


墮落天使 (fish)

by coeur



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Angst, Death, Experimental Style, Friendship, Gen, Ghosts, Inspired by Art, Inspired by Music, Introspection, K-pop References, Literary References & Allusions, Musicians, Natural Disasters, Non-Linear Narrative, Original Fiction, Post-Apocalypse, Science Fiction, Symbolism, inspired by station eleven
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-13
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-08-01 09:57:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 25,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16282442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coeur/pseuds/coeur
Summary: in the year [redacted], soul made a short film.in separate ways, the film has inspired and disturbed strangers in equal measure: a girl who can't seem to get away from the diner she's been haunting all these years, the duo navigating the decaying backwater townships of flooded nowhere, the cyborg witch who kills roads with a lighter, and the quartet of ghostly performers living in an abandoned concert hall with a hole in the ceiling.the same film seen years later, in a world on the cusp of collapse.





	1. the 3-minute reel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [meglioseoravai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/meglioseoravai/gifts), [susanpevensies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/susanpevensies/gifts).



> an experimental narrative focusing more on description & characterization than plot. thematically-linked short chapters inspired by movies and music video concepts. names have been changed.
> 
> **for @meglioseoravai & @jangwonyoungs thx for ur support n enthusiasm when it was still a wip - this one's for you. **
> 
> [probable soundtrack / mood](https://open.spotify.com/album/5lFv3ao98fRG5FXkfoaZa3)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> red can splatter or stain. blue submerges and sinks.  
> a fish, swimming by itself.
> 
> i churned this out in one evening with minor edits so i don't know if i like it just yet 

 

The bleak blue backlight of the neon sign fixed to her wall left a white afterimage when Soul closed her eyes. It was almost perfect.

She removed her hands from where they covered her face, smudged eyeliner on the ridges of her palms. She stared at the black streaks for a while, then wiped them down on the pleats of her dark blue skirt.

This room had been the product of three months of hard work - acquiring a custom-made sign, plain white furniture, the giant glass tank at the side of the room.

It was constructed to be a photography studio, maybe a darkroom, and she liked the way the soft powdery light from the sign outlined wispy edges of the simple white box positioned in the center.

She had painted the walls in soft cornflower blue, removed the main lighting from the ceiling, leaving only the neon sign. One of her friends had loaned her an old projector, and this she used to illuminate the walls with a pretty sapphire glow.

She needed something else - another colour, perhaps. Not just blue.

There was a glowing square around the white box in the middle of the room where she had drawn a thin line of luminescent paint on the floor with a brush. Around this box she had lined little tin cans in random order, some stacked on top of one another, some lying on their side. Most of them were taken from the kitchen pantry, where she knew her mother kept the baking supplies. Canned cherries.

She had one balanced on her knee now, as she sat cross-legged on the floor and surveyed the layout of the room.

Canned cherries were rather sweet. She was careful not to get any of the syrup on her clothes. They were little red jewels twinkling in the almost-dark as she held the can up to the dim light and turned it this way and that.

Red colours were striking, even while they were submerged and choking in blue.

She set the can down carefully, took another bite. The empty glass box by the side of the room was something she initially planned to paint with glitter and fill with blue sand.

It was an old fish tank, and that was where fish belonged.

Soul finished off the last of the preserved cherries and observed the reddish syrup swirling around at the bottom of the metal can.

She thought about fish.

Something red or blood orange would be nice.

   
Soul went to the aquarium with a jar and a plastic bag in either hand. She would buy a red fish and a blue fish. She thought the colours would complement each other very nicely against the deep-coloured backdrop.

The tanks were angular, crystalline prisons. Water was filled three-quarters of the way up, a kaleidoscope of burning orange and blue. She wandered over to this section of colour, where the glass boxes were arranged in straight rows.

The ornamental fishes. The pet fishes.

The lady who ran the shop was very nice, and showed her to a corner of the shop to view the Siamese fighting fish. Their fins were chiffon-like shreds drifting behind them, shawls fluttering in liquid wind.

Blue, mauve, orange.

The lady wasn’t looking her way.

She dipped her fingers into the water - delicately, like she was afraid of puncturing the surface. Everything was cold and alive, glistening and rippling and pulsing beneath her fingers.

Inside, the fish coloured the glass a bright orange, some blue at the corners. For one moment she allowed herself to be dazed. The water, gone mad with light.

With the other hand she gently lowered the glass jar into the tank.

It was a simple job. She had caught herself an angel to take home, paid for with for a few round pieces of silver.

 

Golden hair drenched blue, wondering eyes framed with neat outlines of black and glossy lips set in a slight pout. This was the girl who later filled the tank with water and released the fish into the glass hollow. This was the girl in the gutter, pink-cheeked with rosy hesitation.

The lone fish, swimming in circles. She trailed her finger over the surface of the water for a while, cheek pressed to the edge of the tank. The red was a nice touch. She pressed her lips to the cold surface, a sudden, small gesture of affection for her poster child, a rush of tender commiseration, and left a red smudge on the glass.

 

**=**

 

**THINGS WE GAIN IN THE FLOOD - A SHORT FILM**

_The things we gain in the flood are composed with great care, almost as if the storm had willingly controlled its violence, held something back when carving out statues of dead towns. The sea washes, thick and heavy over bio luminescence stuck to the seafloor. Yet they give you fairy lights of green and blue, and you are pressed with wonder at the extent of how detached beauty can be._

_It is almost a kind of music._

 

**TRANSCRIPT**

She flicks the switch of the projector, dons a silk varsity jacket and turns the camcorder around on its stand. The room is bathed in a gently trembling blue image, a superimposed ocean on the plain walls.

Soul moves the angle of the camera around the room in a slow pan, starting from a close-up of the blue fish tank tinged with a stain of raspberry and a thin, bending river of white back light.

(voiceover)  _That’s my little friend. I haven’t got a name for him yet ... but I will, very soon._

(camera pans slightly to the right to show the impressive neon sign: four Chinese characters.)

Soul tries to read them out in a strained whisper, keeping her voice intricate and hushed. The accent is a little off, but still captures that wistful, perfectionistic charm of girlhood.

(camera zooms out, reveals the white box and the cherry cans arranged around a glowing blue-white line on the floor)

(voiceover)  _That’s the main spot for photography. It’s a little art project I'm doing. Want to see?_

(camera remains still for a few seconds, then pans to the fishtank, zooms in on the Betta fish)

(voiceover, amused whisper)  _Hey there._ (pauses, laughs softly at her own silliness) _Do you want to see it?_

(camera shakes a little, then stabilizes and focuses on the white box in the middle of the room)

Soul moves out from behind the camera and sits on the box. She crosses her legs, folds her hands primly in her lap, and looks around the room, seemingly waiting for something to happen.

The following audio is muffled and grainy, but the words are clear enough.

(voiceover)  _I was quiet for a while. There was an obsession with the colour blue, I think._ (laughs) _The air tasted sweet. It was good back then. I held my own hand and ... stopped biting my fingernails._

Soul bends down, still seated, and picks up one of the cherry cans. It seems to be unopened. She takes her time to prise the lid open, gently inching it forward, completely focused on the task at hand.

The audio crackles slightly.

(voiceover, quiet, steady)  _When you breathe, you don’t notice it._ (pauses, heavy breathing) _You don’t normally remind your heart to keep beating, but it’s still beating, isn’t it?_

Soul takes a cherry out and places it carefully into her mouth, chews without looking at the camera.

(voiceover, whisper)  _Sweetness clings to your mouth when you leave. It disappears when you wash it away._

The footage suddenly switches to display still, monochromatic scenes in which nothing happens.

Curiously, only the colour red is highlighted.

Apples floating in a clawfoot tub. (subtitle)  _Looking for forbidden fruit in a bathtub._

Pulling stems from cherries. (subtitle)  _Tying cherry knots with your fingers instead._

An ornate mirror with nothing reflected in it. (subtitle)  _Stranger - where are you going? Whose clothes are you wearing?_

Footage switches back to show Soul, now facing the camera, seated back in the blue room.

(voiceover)  _You pretend to pretend to know them, imagine knowing someone other than yourself._

The audio is abruptly cut off. Soul leaves the rest of the cherries in the can, places it idly on the floor. She turns to look at the neon sign behind her, expression hidden from the camera.

(voiceover: quiet, steady, benign)  _Maybe we can be scared of one thing, if we are allowed to be scared at all._ (pause) _My song has already ... paled._

The projector image shivers behind her.

The sprinklers turn on. The room becomes a distorted diorama of blue, punctuated by thousands of falling silver specks.

Soul remains seated on the white box, looks slowly up at the ceiling and covers her mouth with one hand.

The cherry cans are rapidly filling with water, knocking over, coral and rose and vermilion spilling out onto the flooded floor.

In the background, the neon sign flickers. Sparks that escape are faintly extinguished, and one by one the individual letters blink and burn out. The blue light of the room fades with lingering slowness until all that remains is the weak, watery glow from the fish tank, the lone fish travelling in lazy half-circles behind the thick glass.

Soul is nowhere to be seen, even though she can unmistakably be heard in the concluding audio.

(voiceover, strained)

_When you sink to the bottom, you can’t feel the rain._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> an [egoist](https://loonaorbit.tumblr.com/post/172399611346/jinsoul-in-egoist) and an [angel](http://heejinst.tumblr.com/post/173866108662/loona-challenge-bias-wreckers-jung-jinsoul) caught me [singing in the rain](https://lipsouls.tumblr.com/post/166526407495)


	2. milkshake ghosts (鬼)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> szu min sits at the bar of a 1950's diner and contemplates the present, while three boys cry in a corner booth.

 

Szu Min has never particularly liked the taste of strawberry. She has a cold metal cup on the table in front of her, about seven inches tall, filled with milkshake, white whipped cream on top and a cherry that has long been eaten, with the stem discarded to the side. The red stem stands out against the grubby tablecloth like a blood vessel on pale skin.

Window blinds cut grey shadows on her face, monotony breaking on deep brown eyes and lipstick stains on the rim of the cup. She sits at the bar, polished metal on metal, round stools, scratched love letters in the countertop from years of girls and boys lounging at the same place.

Calamity Jane existed in the 1950s, and has also been dead ever since. No one comes here anymore. The only source of light is a spectral visitation from the orange-baked, filtered reflection of a desert sun that melts in through the blinds - now permanently drawn - and distended with abandonment.

It has been tinted orange in here for so long that it is now hard to remember the actual colours of the furniture or the food. Everything has been burnt down to a dusty variant of its original state.

But Szu Min doesn’t know why she keeps coming back. She sits with the ghostly patrons, some more real than the others, and the girl at the counter smiles in that funny, morbid way of hers that shows more teeth than what would be considered normal. It is a wide grin that cuts all the way to the ears, like icing on a razor, but draws no blood.

The girl never says anything.

There are three boys crouched away in a corner booth, and they seem to have been here forever. They are always in tears, and she likes to think that it is because of her.

Sometimes she sees a shadow flickering, ringing the bells on the door. She lets them come and go as they please, to the tune of murals and peeling stickers frescoed on the gelato glass cases.

 

They play the same film on the television screen - an old indie flick titled 'Things We Gain in the Flood',that barely lasts for five minutes and features subtitles against a background of stinging blue. Szu Min has watched it many times and particularly remembers the words at the end. The audio is broken, or maybe she cannot hear anything.

She has scratched her own letter into the countertop too - a wonky replica of the words she saw in the short film. The girl inside the film is probably dead. A lot of people are.

The boys are still crying. She has tried to walk past them a few times now, but they will only look up at her separately, and never all at once. At any point in time, one must keep up their vigil.

They wear faded clothes and sit like permanent fixtures in the diner. The booth is pushed away at the far end, and they do not order or eat anything. She doesn’t know what else there is to order, honestly - the cup is always refilled at the end of the day and waiting at the bar for her the next time. She has never had a choice to decide.

Pink is not her favourite flavour. She throws the drinking straw onto the floor and finishes the rest of the milkshake in several continuous gulps. The cup is abandoned on the counter. It will still be there the next day.

Szu Min knows what the words mean, the ones she sees on the table. 'Things We Gain in the Flood'loops on the television screen. She runs her finger over the scratches. There is nothing more fitting to describe what has happened to Calamity Jane. Calamity Jane has given her a reason to wear knee-high socks, but Calamity Jane is a name gone wrong. This one fits better.

Slowly, she finds that the more time she spends in here, the shorter her stream of thoughts become. She can only think in individual stanzas, and parallels are something she can no longer comprehend. She has heard that the owner used to read fortunes in the milkshakes like tea leaves, but she thinks that this is not true.

How the rumours can change so quickly. 'Things We Gain in the Flood' loops again and another three minutes have passed.

The diner closes in comfortingly, and it gets smaller everyday. This works like a drug, for those who come here to disappear too.

She can and will remember them - her three crying boys. If she leaves, she will come back to take them along. She probably returns because of them, but she does not understand this. 

Soon there will come a time when the diner vanishes altogether, and chronology sews a new cloth to cover the past. The bar girl will still be grinning, perhaps, and Szu Min will have to find another place to haunt.

She will stick to one that has a better name this time.

The boys cry to remember that they are still alive. She drinks to preserve activity. Someone must always be doing something. Someone must always be there.

She tries to cry with them, but it never works.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> inspired by sunmi's gashina & a text post on tumblr:
> 
> _"my aesthetic: sitting at the bar of a 1950s diner wearing knee high socks sipping a strawberry milkshake while three boys cry over me in the booth in the corner"_


	3. road sleight (I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> nam and cho live in the remnants of a city once flooded over; or that proverbial hero-and-sidekick dystopian story where both of them set off to explore the world and see if anyone's still out there.

 

It was crap. 

Ever-seeing eyes all around, nothing to smash the dead cameras with even though they'd known since a long time ago that entering unannounced would merit disaster.

This shopping mall was unoccupied, glass-paned ceilings grimy with algae. It could have been seaweed. He couldn't tell the difference yet. Everything that came up from down there had now turned into the same shade of blackish mud.

The flood left it there. Seaweed and all the shit you could think of, dredged up from the ocean. He remembered how the rocky bones of coral dug into the curve of his back when he and Jin slept out on one of the basketball courts.

Nam watched the lithe figure moving about in the distance, knocking her flashlight into things as she pulled hefts of garish old textiles free from cardboard boxes. Cho was seventeen and terribly curious about a lot of things. He often feared for her.

He didn’t know where she came from. She didn’t know where he came from. They didn’t care.

 

Their meeting had been this real funny business that he could have just simply pinned down to fate, but it wasn’t so simple. She was the only kid who tried to steal his vehicle the first time they talked. It was the blue pickup with an old photograph hanging on the dashboard.

He’d left it parked outside, neatly, within the faded red lines of a season lot, and she climbed in through the windows, started the ignition and drove out of the car park just as he came back from his piss break.

He ran after it, yelling, telling her to stop. She did, for a while. Then she pulled the pickup into reverse and he slowed down, panting hard, waited for whoever it was to come out so he could try to reason with them, bribe them, whatever.

Jin would have suggested socking the culprit, but he wasn’t here now, and Nam really didn’t have the energy or vehemence to do any of that.

So he was genuinely shocked when that kid - _that kid,_ with the annoying jailbird grin on her face - reversed all the way past him, holding the driver’s door open with her free hand, the wind whipping dark brown hair into her face.

She was very young, had the feckless ebullience of a teenager. She had this outrageous-looking denim jacket with patches and trinkets slapped all over it, big and small zippered pockets on both sides, chains running down the sleeves, a fur-trimmed hood hanging off the back.

He threw his hands up, walked towards her, and she finally stepped on the brakes with a screeching whine.

Nam wasn’t smiling. The girl killed the engine and remained where she was.

“Say, this thing’s gonna be worth a lot less now, with how much land there is these days.” She pressed the horn, this shrieking, drawn-out note in the metropolitan silence. “Ain’t got much time to drive around, eh?”

“The car market doesn’t exist anymore,” he mumbled.

She sniffed. Still didn’t move.

“Who are you?” he asked, desperate to get the vehicle back. He would play nice.

“You don’t have to know.” She hopped out, swung the door shut with such sudden violence that he squirmed.

The kid paused, lingering outside the door. The ornaments on her jacket rattled and tinkled excessively with every movement she made.

“I’m not going anywhere until you agree to let me drive this thing.”

“And where are you going to take it to?”

She blinked. “To the beach.”

“The beach?”

She nodded.

“Why?”

“Because,” she bounced up and down on the balls of her feet. “I hear there’s fish there.”

“What kind of fish?” he asked, and then immediately wished he hadn’t.

“I don’t know. People have been fishing there for ages.” She dug around in the pockets of her jacket.  “The beach with that big steamer wreckage washed up and the decomposing whale carcass.”

Yeah, Nam knew that one. Driven past it many times. Place reeked of rotten fat and seaweed. Driftwood was puked up all over the sand.

“And you want to fish there as well?”

“Maybe.”

She pulled a folded up, water-wrinkled bundle of paper from her pocket, unfolded it slowly. Nam stared at it, but he wasn’t able to make out what it was.

“You got a home?”

She shrugged. “Yeah, with some people. You?”

He pointed at the truck.

Her face fell. “Oh.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, trying to sound tactful.

“Shit, I’m sorry then.” She started folding the pieces of paper back into the bundle. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Can I have it back?”

“Yeah.” She moved aside to let him through. “Do you still want to go to the beach, though?”

He hovered at the door, key in hand. “Me?”

“Yeah.”

He paused for a beat, thinking. “That place smells really bad.”

“I know. But if you get far enough, out to the rocks, it doesn’t get so bad. Or so I’ve heard.”

“Who’d you live with?”

“A family,” she lowered her voice, “of shoplifters.”

Nam’s eyebrows went up. There wasn’t much to steal here.

“And that’s how you get by?”

“Pretty much.”

Nam shifted his weight from one foot to the other, tried to think of how to end the conversation politely.

“You can hardly call the place a beach now, can you? It used to be a beach.”

“Ah,” she nodded knowingly. “Anyplace can stay the same if you believe it is.”

Nam didn’t agree with that. But he agreed to go along, do the whole thing - exploring and chewing the scenery, all of that.

He hadn't gone to the beach for some time, anyway.

 

She gave him a name, Cho, and they would agree to meet outside this defunct petrol kiosk two afternoons from now.

Cho never told him her full name - whether on purpose or because she had truly forgotten - and so he’d always called her Cho, and she called him Nam. None of them particularly cared for formalities, so it wore off after a while.

 

It rained on that afternoon, so they didn’t drive out. He camped at the petrol kiosk for the two full days until the road started to flood, then pulled into the squatter housing estate for dry land - at last.

Cho came out with a flimsy flower parasol, of all things, of all people. They stood under the orange tent flaps of an empty food stall for a while, and watched the rain subside.

It took some time, but he finally agreed to let her take the pickup out for a little spin, as long as she was very, very careful.

She loved the vehicle. He loved the vehicle. They got on just fine.

 

The sea used to be nice.

Nam had a fondness for hermit crabs, those little ones that scuttled in-between seashells, those you could trust not to snap and hold carefully in the palm of your hand.

He didn't know how many of them there were now - hopefully not extinct - but he hadn't found any, so far.

He still kept a hopeful eye out for them. It wasn't an appetite of any sort, just this small, instinctive need to find and protect, and then return back to a rightful home.

 

Meridian light reached inside the mall, deep and murky like a warning, and it felt like they were standing under the weight of brackish water. The place pounded with echoes of the deceased.

They hadn't quite gotten used to it.

 

The great foyer was steeped in rusty light, carpeting now reduced to mustard-coloured fluff and crusted soil. Nam kicked at a piece of broken masonry, then lifted his flashlight up to the deep recesses of the individual shop units. The greyish pallor of the mall seemed to swallow that little stricken beam of light before him.

Nam still bore a strand of the old nervousness within him, and it weighed down, heavy on his posture, on his outlook, on the way he spoke.

Cho wasn't afraid of the cameras. She grew bolder, with every unit that they managed to successfully take out. After some time Nam managed to get his hands on a broken pipe, and it hadn't left his hand ever since.

The backcountry was, well, swamped, bogged-up, but inhabitable for the highly tolerant. They knew that deserts existed elsewhere, but maybe they hadn't discovered the county lines yet. Kind of hard to imagine the expanse of bone-dry land when all they got here was deadly mud that people could sink into by accident.

The sea came in a lot more now; high tide could reach what remained of the roads and it wasn't a good idea to drive at night if it rained. Could get thrown off course, was what they said.

Find yourself nose-deep in the shit of the Earth the next day, and then, nothing.

Nam was a careful person. He knew what it meant.

 

This whole camera thing had been a joke at first.

They pretended that people were still watching them, that someone was still there to keep tabs on things and pull out their authority on people when they broke the law. They pretended that vandalism was still a crime, and you had to run if anyone else was around.

Cho would do the work, and Nam would keep a lookout.

They took the intact ones along as trophies, but soon it got too heavy for the truck to move, so they ended up discarding everything into a flooded waterway during a heavy downpour.

On that day she waved at the wreckage as it floated down the storm drain, that whimsical side she saw to everything, while Nam stood silently beside her, holding the plastic sheet above their heads and blinking furiously in the rain.

The feeling of getting away was better than survival. It gave them reminders. It was the only time when they felt like they were actually living in a city.

 

That city had been washed out to sea. Now the land was drier, still soggy. Buildings were intact, but they stood like broken glass bottles with cracks you could enter into.

There were bones everywhere you looked, Nam thought. Things were slowly dying, juicing out, worn down to nothing but a pulsating heart that beat weakly to keep the bare strings alive. The city fell down on its knees and collapsed along with the attitudes of people.

They were living on the back of a giant skeleton that had half of its body in the sea and half of it on land.

 _Your one town couldn’t have made it that far_ , Jin had told him, when they slipped back to the vehicle one evening, tired of being on roads and looking at roads and turning the steering this way and that when it was so hard to drive through mud.

Nam had been pretty grieved about that loss for a while.

He remembered the place, and he remembered that he’d escaped to higher ground, and remembered that he’d watched from the helicopter as the town crumbled to gritty pieces of concrete and wood and metal, all stirred around and subsequently dissolved in black seawater like sugar crystals in a teacup.

 

It wasn’t very different from the world contained inside the mall now - everything matted down to shadows. The creeps, if any, resided in the mind, and only in the mind.

“Hey,” she called out, speaking from the cavernous recesses of a caved-in departmental stall. The sound echoed, drew itself out weakly into the light.

He turned around.

“There’s loads of cameras in here.”

Nam pointed his flashlight at her, couldn’t help the amused smile that crossed his face.

“And you’re going to smash them all out.”

"You know me." Cho stepped out, held in her hands a pair of grubby trousers. “You know how to make a slingshot?”

He eyed the shard of broken glass she was holding in the other hand.

“With that?” He pointed.

“I have a clothes hanger. Oak wood, looks like.” She glanced back at the shopfront. “Expensive place this must have been. Such a pity.”

The gold trimming of the sign was still visible, along with some fluffy tulle decoration thing that was strung on a curtain rod from one end of the ceiling to the other. The decoration was ripped and piling down on one side where the pole had broken into two pieces.

Cho sat down on a heap of flattened cardboard cartons, crossing her legs. New stocks of clothes were spilling out of them, still wrapped in plastic that crinkled under her weight.

“Lots of ‘em, in fact,” she said, voice more muffled as she bent down to sift through the pieces of glass on the floor, trying to pick one.

“Hey,” he called out. “Be careful with that.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Nam started precariously in her direction. The light came over him in wavering ripples, changing and shifting through the distorted ceiling.

“Surprised the water didn’t ruin all of it.”

She laughed, then started to unpick the thread from the waistband of a pair of pants with the glass shard.

He observed her for a couple of seconds. “You’re using that?”

She glanced up at him, then back down to what she was doing. “Gonna need at least five pieces of rubber.”

“I’d better help, then.” He crouched down, switched off his flashlight and moved his fingers tentatively over the ground in search of a shard. It was dusty, gritted with everything that could be broken, and sparkling with light.

The glass pieces tinkled on the mosaic, and it sounded like a fragmented music box melody to him.

 

Two hours of trial and error got them a shambled mess of a slingshot, elastic bands bound and tightened over the arms of a large wooden hanger. Cho held it up and experimented with an odd-shaped chunk of cement, aiming for a pillar at the far end of the foyer.

It wasn’t easy to aim at the cameras, though.

“Screw that,” she admitted, after an hour of trying, and failing on nearly all the tries. “Can’t break everything. Just a few, maybe. That ... front row.”

It was nearly evening.

“I have the pipe with me, if you want. But I don’t know I can reach all the way up there.”

Cho shrugged. “Nevermind.” She lifted it up again, managed to chuck something at the round lens of a camera, and a section of it chipped off, leaving a spiderweb of cracked glass behind.

Nam grinned. “Good shot.”

She made a face, then picked another piece of concrete up and took aim again. Nam sat down heavily on the floor, rested his arms on his knees.

“We leave in fifteen minutes,” he called out, then leaned back against the wall.

His wristwatch was an old thing - a peeling leather strap and rusted bezel, but it was one of those old, hand-wound ones that didn’t run on batteries.

Nam stared at the face for a while, then brought it up closer to his ear.

He could hear the ticking sound, repetitive and flat - calm, like his breathing in the deep quiet of the mall.

 

Cho knew the land, the geography of it, when the high tide was, percentage of rain, things he had no idea could be measured anymore. Some people used instinct, and maybe hers was just a bit keener than anyone else’s. Nam preferred to rely on the local updates, although those things couldn’t always be accessed. He had to reach a place which had connections - Internet and telephone cables, the likes.

And all the time he only had this one vehicle to travel in, which meant no crossing river borders or flooded plains without registering for a ferry guy to take you over. They tended to overcharge people, and he didn’t really like that.

That bundled-up heap of water-stained paper had been a map, a bunch of standard old tourist maps from those cheap paper booths, those that you could buy for a dollar or two. She’d taped them together in different places, marked out spots with wads of bubblegum and stickers, and drawn on large strips of beaches with a black marker. Cho kept the map with her at all times, folded up in one of her pockets.

Alright, he thought, when he finally understood what it was for, this kid with bubblegum and stickers pasted all over her map like a pseudo-geographer, or a charlatan geomancer, perhaps she was a useful person to have on his side. Could be real useful for navigation.

He didn't have a map on him. She was still slightly brusque, said too much about withholding information, but he could get used to it.

 

They were the proverbial two against the world, looking for more to join the gang. One guy with a ruddy pickup and a girl with a map. Both equally clueless as to where they were going next.

 _Who the hell knows, right_ , she said one time, and he remembered it very clearly, even in the deep recesses of sleep, trying not to mumble to himself. Nobody really understood where they were walking to in the end.

 

Cho had errands to run, and she needed him to chauffeur her around sometimes. He was alright with helping.

“As long as it doesn’t involve crossing any waterways,” he warned. “I’m not paying for that stuff ever again.”

“It won’t,” she promised.

 

The sun was nice and warm sometimes, at others it was cloudy, never did it disappear completely during their evening drives. They made sure to leave and be back while there was daylight, which meant winter was a tricky task to handle.

Cho took to sitting in the passenger seat and flipped back and forth between the radio stations, much to his chagrin. He got slightly bothered when she pressed her hands on the glass and left fingerprints there. He got nervous when she didn’t put on her seat belt.

Driving with her sometimes felt like he’d been forced to navigate around landmines while blindfolded.

But on days when they were luckier, they saw birds flying down the highway alongside the car, all wild and cinematic, dotted with brown and silver and orange. The wings left shadows on their ecstatic faces. 

 

“Where’d you learn how to drive?” he asked one day, while they were waiting for a refuel.

She didn’t want to tell him. She stole cars to get around, to run those errands for the shoplifters back home.

“So your entire gang survives off thievery, then.”

“Don’t act so damned righteous.” She had this smug look on her face. “It’s becoming a rugged country out here. You’ve probably done more than your fair share of lies and littering, anyway."

 

They had a lot of discussions in-between those destinations, whether it was on the way to pick up milk for the mother or to pay the electricity bills or to buy vegetables with what meagre money the family had.

Months had passed by then.

Cho didn’t seem to be afraid of a lot of things. She prodded and poked at all that he said with the fervor and curiosity of a house cat.

Nam liked to be patient, and he liked being told that he was patient. So he listened, and explained when it was needed.

 

The routine was broken everyday, variations present in where they went and what they did, and they always met up outside the old petrol kiosk. On that other day Cho had a huge bag with her.

Nam looked confused.

“I’m looking for somewhere,” she explained, bringing her fingers to her mouth and biting at the chipped polish on her nails.

Nam pulled his cap on, came up to where she was standing. “What?”

“A few places I haven’t seen yet,” Cho took the map out of her bag and flattened it against the window of the pickup, smoothing creased corners. “No more running errands.”

It wasn’t a very long list, some places indicated here and there in the underpopulated regions of the city, where the buildings had been flattened against the ground, cities made of paper and card stock.

Nam took a lollipop from his pocket.

“There’s this old diner, retro-style, abandoned the last time I checked for reviews.” She pointed at a place marked out in pink. Her finger moved downwards, along a high ridge of road that went by the coast, to a place pasted with a round blue circle.

“This one’s an old theatre where you can watch the sky from the seats. That’s our destination. And after that we take the scenic route back.”

Nam remained silent, lollipop stuck in his mouth. He peered at the map, frowned and scratched his head at the dates she’d written in sticky tabs over those places.

And then he got it. Why it had to be on that day. 7 August. The blood moon, or something that had been mentioned in the newspapers. He hadn’t been fully awake that morning when skimming through the headlines, but he remembered.

“You want to go to Byeol Theatre for the lunar eclipse?”

She nodded frantically.

“I don’t know, seems kind of far. I’ve never gone that far out before.”

“You like the sea, right?”

“Ah.” He exhaled with this sharp, amused sound. “Not so much anymore. Still scares me.”

“Come on," she punched him lightly in the arm. "It’s not gonna be that bad.”

He looked up, out at the grassy expanse of the land before them, all rustic and soaked on the other side of the road where it stretched out to meet the creek.

The sun had coloured the clouds this melancholic shade of lilac. Cho followed his gaze.

“You’ll come along, won’t you?” she said, softly, after a while.

“Yeah, okay." He gave a noncommittal shrug. "But we need food, and a place to sleep, and -”

“The pickup. You can take the front, I’ll be fine crashing at the back.”

When he looked doubtful, she added, “food isn’t a problem. The rest stops along the way are all operational.”

Still he was quiet.

“I mean, you carry your whole house on the back of one car, it can’t be that hard, right?”

He paused for a while, sniffed.

“You did your research, huh?”

“I’ve been planning to go since that day the news came out. Mrs Wu told me about the theatre. It’s kinda famous now, because of the domed roof. Green glass or something like that. Painted stuff in the stage wings and old costumes.”

“They allowed you to go?”

“ _Yes_.”

He nodded.

“Why me, though?”

“'Cos you’re the one with the damn vehicle.”

Nam didn’t see any point in arguing. He sighed, took the lollipop out of his mouth.

“Okay then.” 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there's your [inspiration](https://kyungwons.tumblr.com/post/165603911423/its-just-the-place-my-heart-goes-to)  
> also the ref. to kore-eda's film


	4. this is 现实 (a)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'the deck', and all their musings while living out a tableau of decrepit artistry.

 

[edited]  _i made a typo_  
[edited]  _fixed a couple of things, the timestamps are hard to get right._  
[edited]  _made changes to the conclusion, needed to sound more poetic (or what miwu came in and told me)_

[note]  _all views expressed in this review are mine. or ours, whatever you want to believe._

 

**DRAFT 1**

First posted online, Things We Gain in the Flood was a short VHS film circulated around arthouse forums and interest groups at the time of its release. Today, forty years after its creation, the film has continued to mystify and spark debate over its contents. Rendered almost entirely in blue - with the exception of a few swatches of red, the film, at plot level, seems to describe the plight of a girl whose suffocating solitude in a darkroom appears to be partially healed by the presence of a Betta fish.

The creator of the film, who only gave her name as Soul or Sol (Hangul: 솔), refrained from providing any explanation for the storyline.

The use of contrasting colours and the motif of water have been highlighted as a key motif in the film, along with its subtle, emotionally-charged, voiceover and absence of non-diegetic music. References to popular culture and literary symbolism are present in the film, most notably in the three surreal stills where only the colour red is highlighted. The three key shots (see below) appear in the middle of the film, at the 2:43 mark.

Some fans of the film have questioned and lamented the lack of reviews (or scholarly articles) present on the various topics that surround it. We are, naturally, inclined to agree and suggest that anyone beginning, or intending to begin to appreciate the film should first look through the Internet forum archives, where most, if not all, of the discussions have been concentrated. Theories have run the gamut from metafiction to prophecies of Yesteryear’s Flood and a plea for help, and it would be over-deterministic of us to dismiss any of these as irrational or implausible; as it seems to be, any explanation is valid as long as there is sufficient evidence to back up the claim.

Much of the discourse has revolved around the choice and intention of cinematic techniques involved, and for a couple of years the film spawned a surge of interest in purchasing and displaying neon-lit signs, a prominent feature in the background of the mise-en-scene, especially at 1:29 of the original uncut video, when the back light of the room is first shown in the establishing long shot.

Many experts also praised her use of low-quality lighting here, suitably employed given the thematic concerns of loneliness and isolation in the film, as well as the ambient sound of rain and echo in the room that serve to further heighten the eerie quality of the premise.

All of these theories may hold true, some more than others, although the actual intended message of the film remains largely unknown. With regards to pop-culture in a post-apocalyptic world, it is accurate to say that the film has become a symbol of empathy, a metaphor for life in an age like ours, as well as a beacon of light for the preservation of culture and art in an age where such pursuits are increasingly seen as frivolous and trivial.

Soul herself had strangely disappeared off the radar shortly after the film was posted, and was thus uncontactable during the immediate period of the latter’s immense success. Efforts to locate her have been unsuccessful.

At best, the film is a tribute to home-made cinema; at worst, an uncanny and unsettling early prediction of imminent disaster. Achingly honest and tirelessly beautiful, the film’s last verisimilitude ironically remains as ethereal and transcendent as the light that slowly fades to dark at the end.

**FIN**

© The Deck

 

It had to be signed, ‘The Deck’, and not anything else.

Matt looked up from the typewriter, rubbing at his dust-coated fingers. The piece of junk had been sitting inside the costume closet for a long time. Four letters were faded down to nothing - the ‘a’, ‘s’, ‘i’, and ‘e’. The previous owner had preferred to pound out vowels on their scripts.

He massaged the wrist of his right hand and winced.

It had been two straight hours of drafting - just him and the typewriter holed up inside the musty space. Ying had given him a day to churn this report out, and he wasn’t very happy about it. The replicated VHS tape sat unassumingly next to the typewriter, wrapped in tissue crepe, the kind they used in shoe boxes.

Miwu had come in at some point and place a cup of plain water next to him, took a look at the review, and suggested he put more emotion into the ending.

 _What kind of emotion_ , he had asked her. 

 _I don't know_ , she replied.  _Maybe something that goes off on a tangent about depressing beauty and gore, because that's like, what I got from it? I don't know. Do what you feel suits best._

Depressing beauty. He took it to heart, came up with something decidedly plain and chucked a few flowery adjectives here and there, called it done.

 

Matt pushed the flimsy piece of typewritten paper back to hold it up in the scarce light. Shadows were cast on the surface when he tilted it at a certain angle, outlining crease lines and indentations from the metal mechanism.

It had that rather nice, aged look about it. He pulled the sheet out, satisfied, and pressed it flat on the empty part of the desk. He sat there for a while, re-reading the paragraphs, the clever turns-of-phrases he had used. He understood what people said about getting work done and putting their feet up at the end of it. He didn't put his feet up.

Ying was talking outside, saying something about moving the outdoor speakers to stage left. He heard music, muffled and echoed, this pounding bass that vibrated the floorboards. Seph, probably doing another soundcheck.

The third one this afternoon.

Matt rubbed one of his eyes and got up from the chair, stood languidly in front of the table for a few more seconds, rubbing the other eye.

It was a small space with an ancient desk, a horrible-looking chair and changing screens pushed in on all sides, celadon-green and musty with age.

He pushed the screen aside and stepped out into the cluttered backstage area, picking his way through piles of discarded props and broken furniture. There was a large wire torso standing in the right wing, a mannequin to hold the old sets of costumes for stagehands to make changes, back when the theatre was still operational. He yawned and pushed the red curtains aside, saw Ying standing onstage with a microphone stand that she was still fixing.

The spotlights were switched on. They had two, since the third one was broken by a punk who once snuck into the scaffolding upstairs and smashed his guitar on the lights in the midst of his drunken reverie.

It was amazing, what people were capable of.

Such idiocy, Seph had said, folding his arms and trying to look upset while Ying kicked the guy out. That was a few weeks ago.

The music was loud, gave the space this ethereal, sonorous quality. Miwu was on the other side, quietly practicing her notes.

Matt surveyed the auditorium for a while.

“Ying-ssi,” he said, loudly.

The microphone stand fell over and she cursed.

Matt started in her direction, the music pounding in his head. Ying picked the stand back up and the speakers screeched with feedback.

“Where’s Seph-hyung?”

She looked confused, mouthed, _what?_

“Seph-hyung,” he repeated, louder, “where is he?”

She frowned, pointed down in the general direction of the auditorium. Matt squinted into the darkness, nothing but all those red plush seats and a huge circle of daylight in the middle of it.

If he squinted hard enough, he could see dust specks floating around in that scattered bar of light streaming in.

 

Seph had the new speaker system, something he put together after a long time of scavenging materials from the innards of the projectionist booth - broken-up metal components from the subwoofers, an intact mixing board and a shitload of real dusty but good condition aux cables.

Matt remembered going up the rusted spiral staircase at the back of the theatre, somewhere behind the exit door, but he couldn’t remember which side it was. The projectionist booth was an old guardhouse-like thing that was peeling all over inside, translucent like sunburn, and Seph had looked at it and said, yeah, that’s the kind of place tramps would want to stay in, too private and rundown. 

Like that crazed drunkard, Matt commented.

Seph gazed at the swivel chair for a while, a sad piece of furniture with stuffing spilling out of the backrest from where a person had taken a box cutter to the fabric.

“Not gonna let them get wasted all over the equipment though,” he mused, and pointed at the desk.

“What are you afraid of?”

“Junkies.”

“We haven’t got a living town in sight for miles,” Matt said, watching him clean up the work table with grime-covered hands. “Not like anyone’s gonna want to come up here, anyway. Place looks and sounds like a haunted house.”

“We left the back exit uncovered, didn’t we?”

“That’s because the shutters are broken. Ying-ssi doesn’t care, anyway.”

Matt was inspecting the door, a faded purple piece of plywood which had fallen off one of its hinges - the top one, and was dangling loosely at a funny angle from the bottom screws. He jabbed at it cautiously with the back of his wrist and listened to the squeaks. Parts needed oiling.

Seph dropped a dirty-looking cloth onto the floor with a wet thump. 

“I’m trying to guess how old this place is,” he said.

“I’m thinking -” Matt checked the cornices on the ceiling, “- probably 1970s?”

Seph huffed with amusement. “You sound sure.”

“I’m not. It looks old, but the windows are those louvred glass panes, like the ones in the washroom downstairs,” Matt drew the pattern out in the air with his finger. “Those kinds were ... 1970s stuff.”

“Huh.”

“They just look old,” Matt said hurriedly. “I don’t know how else to explain it.”

"You know, this place had some real pretty name before ... I just can't figure out what it is. Before the blasted sign went down."

"I didn't see it either." Matt glanced out at the hallway, then back at Seph. "The name doesn't matter now, anyway."

The table suddenly gave way, came apart with this sickening series of cracks, and the drawers emptied out. Empty cigarette lighters, scribbled log books, blank receipt paper rolls and wads of mouldy cash bundled with elastic bands in envelopes.

There was something else too, a round thing in a torn scrap of old newspaper.

Seph stepped back, rolled his shoulders. Matt had retreated to the doorway.

Seph looked over at him.

“You did it.”

Ying was the last thing he wanted to worry about now. Girl had them all wrapped around her finger, and for a good reason too - she was the one who’d suggested they set up camp here.

It was a pretty good idea, if they made themselves believe it.

Seph stepped forward and nudged one of the envelopes away with his foot.

It was cash, alright.

He bent over and picked one of the bundles up, but they were all stuck together and tore when peeled apart.

"What the hell."

He dropped it back on the floor and crouched down to look at the object wrapped in newspaper.

"It's a film reel."

Matt inched his way tentatively over to the pile. Bent down slightly, hissing at the sudden jolt of pain in his back.

“Ying-ssi’s gonna kill us if she hears the sound.”

Seph pulled the film reel towards him, tearing the newspaper wrapping in the process.

“She’s not here now,” he murmured, ripping the paper off methodically, holding it up once he was done.

The typeset was old, those brush-stroke style characters for the body columns and grainy photographs. Had this cheesy-looking advertisement for a supermarket at the bottom; a smiling woman with the bottom half of her printed body ripped off at a jagged angle.

The page was brittle and yellowed, visibly water-stained.

“Chosun Ilbo, would you believe it.”

Seph lingered his gaze on the words for a while more, made this amused sound, then crumpled and chucked the wad of mildewed newspaper aside.

He picked the reel up, hefty in its metal casing, turned it over and frowned.

“Isn’t this that contraband movie?”

“What?”

Seph raised it up to his face. The projectionist had written on both sides, with a marker and masking tape as a label, the four Mandarin characters of the original film title.

Matt frowned, shook his head. "Never heard of it."

“I don’t know, this thing was pretty big back in those days. I heard people talking about it.” Seph shrugged.

“And how is this contraband?”

“Okay, maybe it's not contraband, but there’s like, weird material inside,” he tilted it this way and that. “Was probably wrapped up to protect it from moisture and all those nasty things.”

“Are you sure?”

Seph fixed him with a questioning look. “I don’t know.” He started to rise, taking the reel with him.

“Oh no,” Matt said, straightening up, “you’re gonna watch it, aren’t you?”

“Nothing’s stopping me.”

“I could.”

“You couldn’t.” He left the room.

Matt stared down at the piles of cash, rotting and wasted on the floor.

“Hey,” he called out, “we could’ve used that money, you know.”

The light flickered out. He went to the door, looked out, saw Seph’s silhouette retreating down the three-door hallway, purple and dark blue in the bending light. His boots thudded on the floor, occasionally splashing into puddles.

The puddles were permanent; the roof was always leaking.

“At least they died rich.” Seph’s voice came back, muffled and echoing, sounded kind of fed-up. “You’ll probably find a skeleton or two in there, if you look hard enough.”

He laughed, forced and gravelly, and the sound bounced off the dank walls.

 

Sometimes there were people who came in, treated this place like a museum or something, gawked at all the old shit rotting around them and took in the vibes from that pseudo-vintage filter that was slickly lacquered over everything they had inside.

Being alone in here, just the four of them to one huge establishment - sometimes it did things to the way they thought, and this he could tell. Screwed with their thinking in that silent, insidious way. Provided them room to live without interaction, seeing inanimate death and destruction in every corner they chanced upon, and then giving up on the whole clean-up thing altogether.

Seph was becoming more cynical as the days went by, in that dry-humoured sort of way, then there was Ying, who might have well been living somewhere else were it not for the small heap of things she kept propped up against an old vanity - old perfume bottles and old carnival tickets from decades ago, the kind of crazed collector’s knick-knack stash commonly seen in movies.

And Miwu - well, Miwu still sang wonderfully, being the classy thing that she was, but she sang the kinds of songs they hated, belted them in this sad, deep voice thick with resignation and very unlike how it had been in the days before they moved in.

They had screenings at night, sometimes, whenever they felt like it. On a few occasions they had civilised people dropping in: strangers, and they were too lazy to get them to pay up. Seph always watched from his perch up in the projectionist booth, now cleaned out and reconstructed.

 

They did find half of a fingerbone in there, two weeks after uncovering the reel, crushed under the weight of fallen cupboards, then part of a ribcage. They buried the remains in the swamp behind the theatre and laid the clotted clumps of cash on top of the bones before pushing the soil in.

There was a conveniently planted heap of wild daisies sprouting a couple of feet away the burial site, and they uprooted the patch of dirt, laying it on top of the burial ground.

Came out looking like the sort of depressed grave a murderer would dig for their victim. It was raining on that day too.

“Would you believe this luck, man.” Seph wiped at his face. “And good timing too. For the won to sprout roots and grow.”

“Can you just lay it off?”

They strolled back, walking two abreast over soggy grass, Seph balancing the shovel over his shoulders like a yoke. The rain got in their hair, soaked their dress shirts to the skin.

Matt hated the sounds his shoes made when they sank into the bog.

“With all due respect, he died rich,” Seph kept saying, some kind of spite in his voice, like the waterlogged notes were the doings of the poor dead guy, and Matt didn’t know whether to take him seriously or not.

 

They watched the film one night, when Seph finally resurrected the projection unit, made this ridiculous sound from up above when the light finally burned through onto the blank white screen above the stage.

It was a funny way of seating - one person per row, one person per aisle. That night was the strangest yet. The film had no sound, no music at all, no end credits even, and yet he felt it was more complete than anything else he’d seen before.

At some point during the film - Ying had told him later with a rather upset look on her face - she felt like she was drowning in the blue of the screen. So much blue, it was choking. It wasn’t even the pleasant kind of blue, she said, compared it to the deep colour of ocean bottoms and dead computer screens.

“Where’d you find such a weird thing?” she asked them. Seph looked at her with this aghast expression on his face, and Matt wondered, with some sadistic amusement, if Ying wanted to knock his teeth out at that point.

He confessed that he’d never heard of it before either; whatever cult-classic status crap that Seph was going on about that night.

“Pull yourself together, shithead,” she chided. “Where’d you find this damn thing?”

“The projecting room.”

“Up there?”

“Yeah. It was the only piece they tried to keep. The rest were all moulded up, gone to the gallows.” He shrugged, added, “there was money too, lots of it, but that’s a different story.”

“And how old is this film?”

“Wouldn’t know. There was a newspaper it was wrapped in, but the date was ripped off the top, or shredded in the water, I can’t tell,” Seph scratched the back of his head uncomfortably. “Just realised that whoever it was kept the reel with their personal belongings in a - get this -” he leaned forward, “ - a  _locked drawer_.”

Ying tilted her head downward, fixed him with that deeply contemplative and doubtful stare that Matt knew was not a good sign. Actually, she’d been giving them this impervious attitude a lot more in the recent, well, two months.

“The wood broke to pieces, so everything fell out,” Matt tried to explain, seeing the old look of confusion resurfacing on Seph’s washed-out face again. Poor dude got like that when he didn’t have his smoke. Couldn’t think properly.

“Person set up everything inside there ... like it was their second home, or something like that.”

“So you’re saying,” she began, carefully, “that they stole this reel from the cinema, and kept it for themselves.”

“We don’t know if they stole it,” Seph rattled the container with both hands distractedly, “it seemed important, otherwise they wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble to wrap and lock it up.”

Ying didn’t say much after that. They had no way of checking the facts, anyway - out here, miles away from any kind of telephone connection or the dysfunctional Internet.

Miwu also told them about the thing the girl said at the end of the film -  _what was it, I don’t remember, but that was pretty depressing too._  The whole film was. Sinking into holes and descending into nothingness.  _Thought we watched something along those lines before, was it Hitchcock? The water and blood going down the drain hole? Yeah, that._

Then the red came on and she also thought it looked a lot like blood. Or the way it was shot, for that matter. They thought so too. The dark colour was alarming, slick and shining in the cherry cans like the congealed surface of an injury.

Rusted brown-red, that was what they agreed on. Dried stuff you would find on the bladed edge of a knife.

 

And, one month later, after multiple screenings, they finally sat down together as a complete group, and discussed the film.

It wasn’t a very nice thing, though, Matt thought to himself - how they’d only relied on something immaterial, just flickering light images on a string of filmy plastic to bring them back together from where they’d all strayed off to.

Ying didn’t like the film at all. This he could tell.

 

After that, Ying started making them wear white clothes. It didn’t matter what kinds of clothes they were; everything had to be white.

Matt thought it had something to do with that whole ghostly aesthetic thing she had going on with the way they were inhabiting the place. They still practiced their old choreography on stage to an empty auditorium, the soundtrack booming over the speakers, but it felt alien, and his mind wasn’t really into it anymore.

Besides, he didn’t know who the hell they were practicing for.

  
Matt stepped to the end of the stage, looked up at the window of light from the projectionist booth. He was rewinding the previous film.

The music was still playing. And in that moment Matt had this deep sense of being completely alone, stale and idly watching the sky from down here. That busted ceiling. Hanging somewhere between the silence of the theatre, taken out of context, and the sound of human voices.

Seph was running the system on overdrive with this stoned mush of double-layered witch house and out-of-sync cajon beats, the kind of thing only someone like Miwu might be considerate enough to appreciate.

The sound was awful inside the auditorium, built more for movies and plays than high-octane pop concerts. Seph wanted to furnish this wreck with that blown-up phony idealism of his, while Miwu, who’d suddenly gotten all sappy and sentimental, had insisted that they keep the dusty old props and costumes.

The night sky hung above their heads, floating around in that oblong-shaped hole in the dome. If it rained the water just pooled around the seats and flooded the lower aisles. They didn’t care about it much - the bare minimum would usually be Miwu getting some old pails to put around the opening, but that didn’t really help.

It was living with a leaky roof at its finest, but it wasn’t just leaking.

On those days, Matt would sit on the stage, legs hanging off the edge of it, and he would watch the dirty water collect on the stairs, stain dark patches on the red seats, form slivers of white moving in the air.

 

Ying plugged the microphone into the speaker at the far left of the stage.

“I’m done with the review.” Matt followed her into the wings. “Do you want to read it?”

She pushed a chair aside, clambered over boxes of old costumes and pulled back a tarpaulin sheet. There was a round glass table under it, kept in good condition despite its age.

“Yeah?” she said, after a while. “Pagination?”

“Two.”

She bent down to lift a large carton-shaped prop, grunting with the effort.

“Here, help me with this.”

He shifted it onto the table, rubbed the dust off his clothes.

“Uh,” he paused, staring at the old shoe boxes in the corner. “Are you guys having a screening tonight?”

“Yeah, probably.” Ying tapped her fingers on the glass surface, thinking. “I’m wondering where to move this table to.”

“Why’d you want to move that?”

“Because nobody can walk properly in here with this mess.” She looked back at a spot on the floor. “I tripped on the rug twice this morning. It’s not even a nice rug, in fact. That shit needs to go.”

“Then,” Matt said, going over to turn the lights on. “I was thinking - how ‘bout you make, like, a proper room for once.”

“In here?”

“Yeah. I mean your vanity’s over there and - we’ve got this lumpy armchair for grannies and a nice table to go with it.”

Ying watched him with this deathly stink-eyed look of confusion.

He came back, paused in front of her, then added sarcastically, “all you need is a funky tea set and it’ll be the homeliest thing you’ve ever seen.”

She stood back, examined the space that they were standing in. Still a long way from being clean. Garbage lying around, lit up extravagantly like some trashy banquet in dim orange and dazed-out amber.

They really needed to fix the damned light bulbs.

Matt looked up at the ceiling and exhaled heavily, feeling the muscle strain at the base of his neck.

“Yeah,” Ying finally conceded, and started folding the flower-patterned cloth that was slung over her forearm. “For Seph-ssi to slack off here and chew on his cigarettes, I suppose.”

“We all need it.” Matt shook his head. “Could be for the rest of us too.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9XKLqGqwLA)
> 
> highkey influenced by tsai ming liang's goodbye dragon inn


	5. O

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> art and (people) burning up under a blood moon

 

It was a pleasure to burn.

By all means, they had said, announcing this while zoning out three plots of land for re-development. Old flats were all rubble, roads folded in on themselves.

There were five ranges of temperature they had to remember when setting the Centigrade. The one which burned flesh, the one which burned crops, the one which burned paper, the one which burned metal, and lastly, their own combustion temperature.

That last one was a charm saved for emergencies. Bringing the world down, scuff marks and all. Growing desert outcrops with no water in sight, when the burial grounds would mount as high as the sand dunes in the dry areas. When all was well, they could go.

And they liked to center down on small things in autobiographies. So they made a protagonist of the landscape. The best they could find, with hair and skin and a set of nice-looking eyes to close.

The pseudonym O. That's what she went by. Crop circles were her favourite things in the world, because she created them. One could burn within their control, and resist burning if they wanted to.

There wouldn't be much left by the time people like her were done. It took a week to clear a field of dying wheat, and wilted farms were also her specialty. They had designated people for each section of land, hoping that the smoke would dissipate soon enough to make space. Fire dried out the dampness inside, but it wasn't enough.

O was thought of as an entity, and only made the decision to switch to a brand of highway destruction after finding out about this bare expanse of land along the coast, although the location remains largely unidentified to this day. O was known for her circular designs, often in the form of concentric patterns traced along the surfaces of damaged property.

People never told them where to go. Entities like her carried the effect and memory of cremation with them wherever they went, and switched allegiances as quickly as the tides changed course.

So they would have tracked their protagonist and followed through on the route they took, examined the way they walked. The world could not and would not revolve around them until the end of time, so the investigation would have to end sooner or later, and by then they would have learnt to bid goodbye to this one, and they would have prepared a replacement.

O's journey was a long one to self-destruction. The temperature at which flesh burned was an experiment that she tried to carry out on legions of unassuming people who tried to feed her but failed to do so. She had no need for human food.

There was a stove in the corner of the noodle store, and she had a silk dress on.

And the order that came to mind was the fact that these people were asking to be dead. She gave it to them.

 

O left after that, red pooling at her feet and ashes in the strands of hair, straightened and shined to a high synthetic gloss. Black fibers.

Then, two days later, there was a request to switch to inanimate objects.

She wanted to kill places, not people. They cried when they burned. She wanted the privacy of burning in a quiet place. She wanted the corn to scream at her in their dumb, muted way.

They let her carve patterns into the fields with a lighter that dangled from her fingers. She had a cigarette in her mouth at all times, because there never was a need to talk or reason, and so she never had to open her mouth. It gave her a look, a certain kind of rakishness that she could not find anywhere else in this tasteless landscape.

 

O found out about the road and the highway in the late part of her career, and she spent the next two months creating non-existential traffic jams. Tar cracked and liquefied mud caused the buildings to subside. She let the glass burn on the grass.

One of those rules was to walk away, while it was still burning. She had violated protocol before, but this one she took great care to obey.

This was three months closer to the termination deadline.

 

She burns a neat, clean insignia of her name in a patch of trees. She likes how the flame is pliant, a tubular stream of heat that bit back at wood and vegetation, cleaned and razed the strip of forest to the ground. She went in circles, clearing until she got a thick line of brown that would look good from the sky.

She did it for the ones who watched from above.  
  
  
  
O got to the highway and stood by the edge of the road that overlooked a cliff. The sun was a cherry ovoid blur on the horizon. She held the lighter up and estimated the size of the flame in relation to the reddish smudge over the sourish sea.

And it was a small, disappointing fact, that there was nothing here she could get hold of, nothing that could rival the heat that poured down from the sky. It was a metal bath that led to a bloodbath and then a final cremation.

A cremation of the city.

She watched as a bird landed on the railings. She stood very still. 

The bird flew away. 

That bird would not last long. She would get more of their kind out of the city, take all the trees away and hit the tarmac with everything she had. There wouldn't be any forests left by the time their kind was done with the job.

They would not dare to come here anymore.

She let the wind come, and it blew the flame out just as the sun started to darken.

 

There was an eclipse that night. She did not know what it was, but the darkness of the field and the red of the moon made her feel something strange. A longing for the uncomfortable heat of disaster again.

She had to burn something that could not be disintegrated.

 

And this is where we lost contact, and we have to go back.

She wants us to remember what it is like at the end. She can tell us because she has the luxury of a waiting audience who will be made to listen to her. Not many of the others have opened up to speak. The non-protagonists die alone.

There is no viewfinder trained on their faces as eyes become still, no close-up on the crimson curling of plasticised flesh.

The symptoms start like this: increasingly - or maybe - she thinks the orders are becoming less and less like orders, and sounding more like requests. _If you wish to do this, do this first._

She follows these orders to a tee.

And then, one day, she decides to deviate.

 

On the day of the eclipse they tell her to attack the road that runs down to the supermarket and torch the wreckage of the cruise ship that is perched on top of it. She creates a space in the field for herself to lie down, and watches the moon turn red. There is soft grass here, surprisingly dry for the post-flood years.

She feels the blades tickle skin that has been manufactured to feel. Everything for the haptics.

The moon is going to burn up, she thinks. She wants to be there to watch it. She wants to watch it burn quietly in the middle of a corn field. The road around her is a ring of dying embers.

This was the afternoon's job. She is done for the day, for the night.

The flames lick inwards, creeping towards the center of the cornfield. The road is gone. She has set the temperature at a balanced level, calibrated to start eating, being the hottest from the outside, and then chewing down to the center, where the crops were.

To take great care in the process, the heat staves itself off after several rounds of movement. The most delicate kind of discomfort is the pain of burning skin. This is the lowest and the mildest.

It does not take much to physically kill a person.

O has a pact to keep with the things she has burned before. Just as she has loved them at their noiseless end, she too, vows to disappear without a sound.

The flames close in and start on fingers and toes, then make their way across the expense of bare skin to the dress, to the head, and then to the beating red muscle in her chest as a blooming red clump beneath the cage of bone.

The fire is reverent, almost gentle, in consuming the creator and the torchbearer, and leaves everything as it lies. Her grip on the lighter is not a death-grip but a fist of victory.

The muscle clenches and squeezes despite the scorching heat, almost as if it cannot let go. To her it is a loud sound that she is unable to control. 

The city must have felt her pity as it went down in the water - to submerge, and to let go of vision completely. Giving in here was not a choice. She keeps her eyes on the sky for as long as the heat will allow her to.  
  
There are only flames that will listen to the final thought as the grass burns under the red moon.

 

She kindles the fire for ten minutes and thirty seconds.

There is still noise. There is still the sound of things falling and ripping apart, until the fire dies out and finishes with what it has come to start. By then the clock can rest.

Then the camera will leave as well, and lay the scene out, bare, for the takers to take what they need. They are usually greedy, and bargain a lot, especially on a death day after a lunar eclipse. The people come with old-fashioned woven baskets and things to trade.

Some people say that it is luck. One person might comment on the texture of her silk dress, pressing the untouched material between calloused and manicured fingers. After that, many of them will clamour for the fabric. Someone might keep the lighter and pry the stained cigarette from the cruel bite between her powdery lips, now reduced to ash.

The have every right to keep what they need. _Vintage collectibles. Art is dying. We must preserve our daily treasures._

Then they will send a vulture. Vultures who dine on ashes come by cheap and easy. They are messy eaters, and leave nothing behind. They have no foibles.

_Blood moon makes people lucky, makes people lose all sense of inhibition, gives things back to nature. This girl has no luck. She ran out of it. Who knew people like her would be the kind to go out with a bang, uh? Who even notices these things?_

They talk over the dead body, pointing and shouting at symbols. She is privy to nothing of the sort. But she knows that the silence is hers.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [cyberpunk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHmVqMISPLw) [capitulation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYG_4vJ4qNA)
> 
> for the record, o looks like olivia hye with the pocket lighter in egoist  
> first line's from fahrenheit 451


	6. road sleight (II)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the road trip: introspection, shoplifting and dropping in at a haunted diner.

 

The sun was absent from everything they could see down here; a borderless sky that was grey and bloated, and stretched above them like a thick blanket.

Nam made a right turn. They’d been driving for two hours and he’d scheduled a rest stop at this point - just enough time to get them food and go for a washroom break.

There was an open-air carpark before the rest stop ― this small, square building with a blank yellow billboard fixed on top of it. The concrete had been cracked in many places below, jagged lines cutting harshly through the empty lot like scars.

The vehicle bumped, going against the sharp angles of unevenness. They slowed down considerably, the pickup squeaking as it rocked.

Nam pulled it to a gentle stop, carefully reversed into a lot marked out in splattered white paint.

Cho observed him checking the rear-view mirrors, shifting the gears. She laughed, this sharp-sounding chuckle that was oddly cheerful.

“World’s gone to _shit_ ,” she drawled, crinkling the map. “And you still mind the lines.”

He shook his head, couldn’t stop himself from wanting to say something out of self-effacing pity. It was silly. It was a habit. Trying to find order in places where it could still be found.

“Yeah, yeah.”

Cho folded the map into half and laid it on the passenger dashboard. She unbuckled her seat belt.

“Do you have money on you?”

Nam switched the engine off, placed both hands flat on his lap.

“Yes.” It sounded like a question.

She exhaled heavily.

“Look, I’m not gonna ask you for it. But I don’t know how long it’ll last us if we spend it all on day one.”

Nam was silent for a while, then he reached over and pulled the glove compartment open, fishing around inside for a folded white envelope that he withdrew and balanced delicately on his knee.

“Where’d you get that from?”

“A small job I used to hold … some ad-hoc deliveries here and there. Half of it is counterfeit, but I don’t think anybody bothers about that now.”

He untied the elastic band that bound it, thumbed through the wad of wrinkled notes inside.

“I’ve got small change here, not big ones … it’s all the thousands and five-thousands.”

“So I’ve heard.” Cho scratched the back of her head. “Stuff goes so cheap now the quality might as well be something given away for free."

"Yeah." 

"Never paid attention to price tags. Don’t need them.”

“It’s not exactly consumerism anymore, not in this climate.” Nam rubbed the bottom of his chin with his knuckles, looking troubled. “More like … barter trade. They just want the item, and nobody cares if it’s fake money or not. Some places just accept the old system.”

“Of what?”

“Those kinds ― a favour in exchange for something else. Maybe help them with a few rows of garden tending or delivery, and they’ll give you something in return. A lot of farming going on out there. They have some sort of unspoken rule about keeping the status quo of prices so the money won’t become worthless."

“So that’s how you get by.” Cho nodded. “Helping people.”

She looked away, and when she spoke again, her voice was laconic, resigned.

“You’re a real noble one. Last of a dying breed.”

“It does a lot of good to your mental state,” he said sombrely. “You don’t worry about folks knocking on your doors at night begging for blood.”

“No, sometimes being good doesn’t mean people don’t come and find you. Someone in my settlement was burgled because they had one cow and they didn’t want to kill it and the village had a meat shortage.”

“Ah," he rubbed his nose. "That’s bad.”

“Would you believe that crap ― it’s like we’ve gone back to the prehistoric age. Quarrelling over food and land. People are getting territorial. You look at one of my neighbours and the way he speaks and thinks now, you’d hardly be able to tell that he used to be one of those cubicle rats.”

Nam shrugged slightly, tried to come up with something smart and consoling and appropriately cynical.

“The dark ages.”

“They thought it was one of her patrons, one of the rough desperate dudes from out of here. Bunch of twenty-somethings went out to find him - this neighbouring settlement ― and they kinda ― they kinda killed the poor dipshit.”

Nam shook his head.

“But they don’t know if it was the guy. I think they just killed because of that thing, the shit thing they always say, an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.”

“Do you know them?”

Cho hesitated. “In passing.”

She fiddled with a string of bells sewn onto her jacket sleeve.

“You know,” she began suddenly, “the population can really be a piece of _shit_ when it comes to reinventing ourselves. You’d think that some kind of disaster would wipe out all our problems, like they say, refreshment for the soul and rebirth and all that crap? But what we did so well, what we’ve been doing so well is to bring back all that old stuff from the world as it was before and try to rebuild it all again. It’s stubborn as hell.”

“Self-healing.”

“Eh, you’ve got a nice way of putting it.”

“I think the first instinct anyone has after a disaster is to try and pull things back into the same way that it was before, not to rearrange things into a … new and exciting concept. You don’t exactly have the frame of mind to do it, anyway.”

“Water doesn’t have any nutritional value. You can drink it and starve to death after a long time if you don’t get anything to chew on.”

They slid into this confused stillness, Nam trying to understand.

“So the same things we’re used to kind of give us this stability.” He spoke carefully. “It wouldn’t have made any difference if it – if it wasn’t water.”

“I’m trying to make you see the irony in this.” She grimaced. “No rainbows after the rain, huh?”

“You look at it like it’s a flood that cleanses. But it’s not. I don’t think the idea of whimsical can fit anything now. You can see the mess and romanticise it, say that it’s wonderful chaos that we’re living in but look at it again, without the rosy glasses, and you’ll understand it for what it really is.”

“How absolutely bleak.”

“If that’s the word.”

“Yeah. Did you go to school?”

“Yes.” He frowned. “You want to know where it is. It’s gone.”

“They ever teach you anything about exam strategy?”

He breathed in, loud and audible. “Sure.”

“You know in an exam they always say, do all the questions and skip those you can’t solve, and come back to them later?”

“Yes.”

“If you take that approach to finding things now, you’ll see that it doesn’t work.”

“It won’t work. Two different things.”

“Yeah, but if you taught those kids to solve problems like that, you think they’d do it any differently now?”

“Maybe not.”

“When I took things from people I started out with this method. I took easy targets and left the hard ones for later. But then I found out that it was getting more difficult ― sometimes I’d get caught, more often than not, and I’d just drop everything and get the heck out of there. People got no energy to chase you, anyway.”

“Then what’s your strategy now?”

“I get the valuable shit first, essentials, the things that are the hardest to take. Once you finish that it gets a lot easier.”

“I see what you mean.”

“Yeah.”

“But it’s still different. You know in an exam we don’t have time. We have to maximise efficiency, or whatever you want to call it. So we hit everything with what we’ve got, hope that some of it sticks, and then we come back to deal with those that didn’t but could.” Nam pushed the steering wheel back and forth. “When you have the option of time, you can slowly finish everything in chronological order, choose the most important ones first."

“But this feels like an exam, doesn’t it?” Cho leaned back against the headrest and snapped her chewing gum. “We begin in ten minutes. You have a time limit of three days to get to the site for the eclipse, or you fail.”

“Well, you kind of imposed it on us.”

“I actually liked exams, the adrenaline rush from going through the whole paper, finding those questions I could do and doing them and just hitting the damn nail on the head.”

“They were fine.”

She scraped her shoe on the carpet. “You can say all that ‘cos you’re probably smart.”

He chuckled. “I don’t know.”

Cho pulled the sticky blue wad from her mouth, examined it and pushed it back in, then started chewing again.

“Whatever.” She snapped the gum. “If this is an exam we’re still on track. Just plough ahead with it. Don’t get stuck on small little things.”

“We haven’t really ―”

“Yeah, we have. Now. You let me go in there and get something for us to eat, just a small thing, and you can use the money to pay for it. Next time I’m just gonna pop in without any cash on me. You’d better be ready to drive off.”

He was looking out of the window, shoulders slouched and head hanging.

“I ― it feels wrong.”

“You’ve never done it before so you wouldn’t know. Then you shouldn’t write off what you don’t understand.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, like he was staring into a very bright light. The interior of the pickup was starting to get stuffy.

Cho wound the windows down, stuffed the cash back into the glove compartment.

“I don’t want to make it difficult for you. I already said that from the start. Just let me do my thing.”

He opened his eyes, this exhausted look in them.

“It’s wrong." 

“Rugged country,” she repeated again, loudly. He sighed. “All colours will agree in the dark. Remember that.”

 

And she did it, still a little grumpy with his bothering. He knew what those pockets on her jacket were really used for, all the fast cuts from grasping an object in one hand to holding nothing in the next scene.

He was standing in the aisles, browsing through mostly empty shelves, and eventually had to leave the store before she did. 

The air-conditioning was dripping blackish water onto the floor tiles.

He waited outside, near the broken petrol stands with the fuel nozzles hanging from their cords like tethered payphone receivers. He walked to the back of the store, took a close look at the peeling paint, and walked back.

 

When she came out again there was no sound. She pushed the glass doors open and walked down, hands stuffed in pockets and the ornaments on her jacket rattling loudly.

He waited for her to go back to the pickup, then quickly scrambled over.

“How was it?”

She spun around to face him.

“Oh,” she grinned. “Yeah. It was good. Fine.”

“Did you, uh, get the food?”

“Everything we wanted.”

He looked back at the store.

“You’re sure they didn’t see you?”

She shook her head.

Nam stared at the car, then out at the road. His head felt light. He breathed in, felt the thinness of air entering his lungs. 

“We’d better go, then.”

“Yeah.”

They clambered in. Nam turned the engine on, winding up the windows.

He kept looking back at the store.

“Hey,” she hissed, hitting him on the arm. “Stop acting like that. They’ll notice you if you do.”

He blinked rapidly, tore his eyes away and turned the ignition.

 

They got out onto the main road. Nam watched the image in the wing mirror ― that of the station receding further behind them, until it disappeared.

"Do you mind?" Cho said, reaching for the glove compartment.

"No."

She pulled the things out of her jacket one by one ― all crinkling packets and aluminium ― and placed them in carefully, like she was stocking a refrigerator. Then she started moving the items around inside and taking things out ― an old flashlight, a clear plastic box filled with stationery ― taking long, close looks at them, and putting them back in.

"You keep books in here," she said. "I didn't know you liked to read."

Nam threw intermittent glances in her direction, wanted to switch the radio on, but then decided against it.

He suddenly coughed and covered his mouth.

Cho looked up sharply. She propped a can of juice against the side of her seat.

“Whoa.” She straightened up, offering him another can. “Look, you’re making it seem like you’re the one who went in there.”

He laughed weakly, took it and placed it into the side holder with clumsy fingers.

“I keep thinking they’d have seen you, or something.” He paused, cleared his throat. “Just … didn’t choose to do anything about it.”

“Usually that’s the case,” Cho said. “It’s also goodwill, if you think about it.” She closed the glove compartment.

Nam rolled his left shoulder, working out a knot in the muscle.

The engine droned on.

His gaze drifted from the road to the picture hanging from the rear-view mirror. It was a blank magazine cut-out of the beach in a grimy lanyard cardholder.

“I’ve never looked at it that way,” he replied, soft and distant. 

“I know.” Cho bent down to pick up a soda can that had rolled onto the carpet. “You’re scared, like anyone would be.”

“When did you first start doing this?” 

“When I was a kid.” She pulled the metal tab open, licked at the fizz that came out. “I don’t remember the age. Maybe early teens. Same sob story is what they all say when anyone asks. I stopped talking about it after a while.”

“I mean, I should be sad that you had to do that.”

“Don’t be.” She tore a packet of crackers open. “Honestly? It’s fun.”

He was quiet for a while. Cho reached over and turned the radio on, the sound crackling at first, then shivering unsteadily with the poor reception.

“You know,” he spoke again, almost curious, “in all the years I’ve been driving around after the flood, I’ve never witnessed an accident before.”

“Why,” she broke a cracker into half, held one piece out. “Do you want to see one?”

“No, no.” Nam reached over to take it from her. “It's only an observation." She laughed.

“How’d you notice these things, anyway. I just drive, man.” 

Nam checked his wing mirror. 

"Hey," he said, smiling to himself. "Nice car coming up."

They both looked out of the window to the right, at this funky red convertible with the rooftop wound down. There was a woman driving it, and two kids sitting in the back sleeping, their heads pressing against the doors.

The car sped ahead at an uneven pace and eventually left them behind.

"I saw a corpse, once, when I was a kid." Nam paused, swallowing with visible effort. Didn't look at her, "It was roadkill. I remember the bones sticking out. They looked like ceramic. I think it was a water deer."

He straightened up, the seat belt scratching noisily against his nylon jacket.

"Can't rub the image out of my head."

 

They wound the windows down just a crack, all for the ventilation. It had been two hours of dull engine noise and blurred music. The clouds were still thick, covering the sky with an even coat of grey and white. No strong sun, no bright colours. The road was disturbingly uniform in its linearity.

Cho suddenly reached up and jabbed the picture dangling from the mirror.

“What’s this for?”

"Oh, it's a ―" Nam reached out instinctively, stopped it from shaking. "― A decoration."

She put another cracker into her mouth, chewed and leaned forward, scrutinising the picture without touching it.

“It’s blank.”

"Yeah." Nam looked at her. “Uh, it’s kind of ... faded.”

“So what’s it supposed to be?”

He rubbed at the back of his neck. “The beach.”

“Ah,” she nodded, this knowing look on her face. “The beach.”

“Yeah.”

“ _Which_ beach?” She smiled.

“I don’t know. It wasn’t mine.”

“Someone gave it to you?”

“Yeah. An old friend.” Nam watched her carefully from the corner of his eye. “But he’s not here anymore.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t really know." He paused. "He went away, I guess.”

“Must be the deserts.” She reached for her drink. “When they leave it’s usually to go there. We’ve had, like, five deserters in our settlement already.”

"And you haven't gone yet."

"No. What the hell." She shook her head. "Who would?"

“Why then?” he asked. “Why'd you hate them?”

Cho shrugged. “‘Cos we’re envious.” She shook the packet, rattled the crumbs around inside.

“I mean, deserts aren’t much fun anyway. I heard it’s too dry there.”

“Yeah, and the dust storms.”

“The dust storms.” Nam nodded punctiliously.

“Oh, the old diner that we’re going to.” Cho sat up. “The old diner – I think it’s in a desert.”

“Really?”

“My map. It shows a patch of land, converted from a forest clearing into some old-timey theme park in the past. Carnival cleared out, left all the shops behind. The sand and dust just built up after a long time.”

“So it’s not a perennial desert.”

“Couldn’t have been. I’ve been doing a bit of reading, by the way ― using that crap connection at home. They say people are hiring these arsonists to torch their land and keep the peat on fire.”

He widened his eyes. “That’s new.”

“The stuff under the mud apparently burns for a damned long time. They think it dries the land out, or something like that.” She picked crumbs off her clothes. “I could get a job if they let me.”

“People will thank you,” he glanced over at her, amused, “for contributing to the haze.”

“There’s not been any yet.”

“If what you’re telling me is true, it sounds like a growing business. Could be a potential problem.”

“They’re not even human.” She shrugged. “Not all of them.”

He glanced at her. “What are they, then?”

“I saw something about witchcraft … and cyborgs.”

“So it’s either some mass ritual thing or mass destruction.”

“That makes it sound like a bad thing.”

“Well ― I’d be wary about coming across any of this. Some of them just crop up because of rumours." He brushed something from his face. "They think that there’s life out there beyond the settlements. And walking robots are pretty popular now.”

"Really." Cho sniffed. “They weren’t so smart either. Else they would have gotten people out of the flood a whole lot quicker.”

“It probably ... failed, at that moment.” He frowned slightly. “Version five, or something, the last I heard. Wonder where the company is now.”

Cho shifted in her seat. “The quasi-sentient ones?”

Nam nodded.

“Rotting away in their broken building, maybe.”

“Makes you think a lot about getting here, doesn’t it?”

Cho took slow gulps of her drink, finishing off the last of it. She held the can up for a while, reading the nutrition information.

“Yeah.”

“If you look back at it ― really look back at everything that happened, when you think about what the first point of the event was, when that first tremor started ―”

“The first wave was May 6th. That was the first time they saw it recede.”

“I think I remember seeing it in the news.”

“We wrote it down, somewhere … on the newspaper.” Cho crossed her legs. “First wave was May 6, coastal areas inundated. If I remember correctly it was the fault near west Japan. There was a big one, then …”

“Four aftershocks,” Nam interjected. “I counted at home. Kept up the night watch for it.”

"Wait, didn't your area receive any warnings?"

"That was later on."

“Huh. They sent us out of there really quickly." She frowned, trying to recall. "The storm surge came in on the 10th. Yeah, 10th May.”

“We were quite far inland," Nam said carefully. "But there was a lot of rain in my area.”

“That was the tropical storm. There was also a category 6 that hit Taiwan, a few days before.”

“Oh man.”

“It was a big one. You know why. Those things kept getting worse." She sighed. "We probably knew it would happen someday, anyway.”

“It’s a pretty funny thing. The fact is that when the earthquake happened, at that point, we were still doing whatever we did. It starts small, then moves out to come full circle. I can only imagine what those seismographs showed.”

“Really bad things, I bet.”

It was quiet for a moment. Cho was eating, chewing loudly. They'd been rattling on in front of another grey lorry that had a dark window, the barely discernible face of a sullen-looking guy seated in front.

“You also have that strange sense of being here, after going through all that," Nam said, rubbing his thumbs against the fake wood of the steering. "To have people going around like living reminders. It gets sharper and sharper every year. You know that you’re still walking around after what happened. That you’re allowed to occupy space. You feel it more now.”

Cho shook her head slowly. “I kinda ― saw it as a reason to stay.” 

“Staying’s a brave thing to do.”

“It is. Among survivors, I think there’s this sort of level playing field. Like, we all made it out. That thing just fades away, then we create new ground for competition again.” 

Nam nodded.

“Anything goes, though,” she added, picking at her fingernails.

“There’s no order but things just ― carry on.” Nam said, all quiet, with this strong sense of deliberation. “It’s like restarting life. I don’t know what those guys at the top are going to do, but the people down here are sort of trapped in this endless cycle of … wandering.”

“It’s like we’ve just moved to a new planet, huh.” Cho rested her arm against the door, pressing her face into her fist. “Everybody just migrated to this sprawling hellhole of a swamp and took our ancestors’ _ghosts_ along with us.”

They fell into a brooding hush, the pickup going at a steady pace. The picture swung slightly as a strong burst of wind suddenly came in.

On Cho's side, a grubby-looking car sped past them, all tinted windows and broken headlights.

Nam tapped his empty drink can against the steering wheel. The cracker packet lay crumpled and empty on the dashboard, and the music was still playing softly.

“This place lives on in speculation,” he finally murmured. “Only in speculation.”

 

The next rest stop was somewhat of a disappointment – sticking around at the cranky old diner, Calamity Jane. It was painfully empty on the inside. The door was unlocked, and the cheap plastic sheets covering the windows to prevent dust from coming in disintegrated when they were brushed against.

They parked the pickup behind it. Cho went out with the map and a new piece of chewing gum in her mouth. Nam plodded after her with the metal pipe, pulling the brim of his cap down.

The sun hadn’t come out. All the grass here was dry and rough-edged, rusty-green and sparse. There was sand everywhere, this burnt orange powder that stuck stubbornly to rough surfaces. The forest around had been cleared.

They shuffled through the sand, trying not to kick any of it up into their shoes. The wind blew, and it was warm.

Cho was walking a short distance in front of him. They both coughed at the same time.

 

When they creaked the door open, they noticed the sharp shadows on the blinds falling onto the dusty floor, forming uneven slices in the tiles. The mosaic was old and sloppily grouted in several places.

Nam remembered the old mall.

Cho went to the counter, crossing the length of the room. Her boots left imprints in the grit on the floor.

Nam stayed where he was, looking apprehensively around the place. He could make out the booths, the bar stools, the edges of rusted metal frames under the tables. He saw the hanging light fixtures, all broken and draped with dark-looking stringy objects. He couldn’t tell what they were in the dim light.

The door swung shut behind them when the wind blew again. He turned back and saw the tarnished metal bells hanging from the frame.

Then he went to the nearest booth, stood just next to it and peered at the state of the plastic and the metal, at the little round aluminium stand for paper napkins.

Cho came back with a steel cocktail shaker in her hands.

“This thing was left back there.”

They stared at it for a few seconds, squinting at the shiny out-of-place lustre of the metal.

Cho went to take a look at the bar. The stools were jammed at different heights, some with broken seats. The surface of the bar was covered with dust.

They regarded the drink machine at the back with a strange sadness. It had red plastic as an outer shell that was now curling out to blistered pink. The stillness of evening light turned the metal levers blue and orange at different angles, reflections of the space around them.

There was a television, one of those cathode-ray ones with a thick convex glass screen hanging from the roof, just above the drink machine.

Cho went behind the counter, holding the map behind her back and bending down to peer at the contents stuffed in a crushed jumble beneath the ledge.

Nam drifted over to the display case, a tarnished cheap gold structure fitted with clouded glass that had stains on it. The individual troughs were left in place. There were faded stickers – decals, on the glass, at the bottom right-hand corner. Swirling patterns and drawings of fruit, all faded down to nearly nothing now.

He saw a plastic cookie jar with what looked like crumbs and dead insects inside. The lid had been cracked open. This was placed on top, standing at the far end of the display case.

Cho was moving something. The solid sound of metal clinking against metal drew him back to the counter.

She was laying the utensils out gently, afraid to break them.

Nam saw the way the light would have come in onto this side of the diner through the broken blinds on the left. In the hot, sultry afternoons and mornings. Falling at forty-five-degree angles onto the floor in a mesh of stretched rectangles.

Nobody would be there to see the slow process, he realised. It was like standing in a time capsule.

Over the years, the afternoon sun could carve a shape into the floor.

 

When they’d finished taking a look at the place, Cho took the wad of gum from her mouth – now grey and tasteless – and stuck the clump to the edge of one of the booth tables. She took the cocktail shaker and slid it inconspicuously into her jacket pocket.

Nam stood at the windows for a while, looking out through the filter of broken blinds and disintegrating plastic sheets pasted behind them. When he shook the blinds, the bits of thin plastic fell like wispy snow.

He watched them float on their way down.

 

“Did you actually like it?” Nam asked her later, shuddering as they made their way to the exit.

Cho just smiled. The holographic sequins on her jacket reflected faint rainbows onto the wood when she stood in front of it. She let her hand rest on the door handle for a few seconds, then went out.

When they closed the door, Nam thought he saw a flicker of light come on from within the confines of the dead television screen. He didn't tell her this. What he would remember was the small piece of chewing gum fixed on the edge of the table, abandoned and gathering dust in its own time. 

They left the diner, hands jammed into coat pockets, looking around. The place settled behind them, breathing slow and unhurried in the process of wasting away. It would be dark for a long time.

Outside, the unbroken orange landscape was blending into early evening.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [the car radio](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l971y5UUOxU)


	7. gaia ex traction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> \- we'll digress to talk about eating in controlled situations.  
> \- the world here is a dead AU & he's not the only one watching it fall apart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i must confess this was a little writing prompt i did ard two years ago so it's pretty awkward

 

EXTRACT: PANOPTICON

or what could have happened.

 

These were the things he managed to salvage from the rubble: an old book with an olive-green cover that he had no recollection of, a lighter with no liquid left inside - he threw that out after a moment of hesitation, a kitchen knife, one of his old plaid shirts with a tiny rip in the left sleeve, a black necktie, a dented can of expired cherries and a tiny figurine of a boy riding a bicycle. He stored all of this very carefully in an old rucksack that he also pulled from the remains of his old house.

The man's face was dirty, lined with soot along the premature wrinkles developing on his forehead and near his eyes. He hoisted the rucksack onto his back and left without a second glance at the broken house behind him, black smoke still rising from the burning rubble. It happened all the time. He couldn't do anything to stop it.

The way through the broken concrete was a slow and tedious process. He scanned the grey murky landscape. One of his eyes had a cloudy white mist around the area where the pupil should have been, with only a small pale ring of deep brown around it that indicated there was ever a seeing eye in its place. There was nothing here of interest to him. He turned in the opposite direction, remembering the way back to the station like the back of his hand.

 

Gus was thirty-two this year, although he remembered going through a lot more than what most people his age would have, in another world. The rucksack was not heavy, although it bore the weight of his entire survival, at least, until he found another place to raid. There would be no more food for him until he reached the station.

The stations were located in all parts of the land, easily identifiable by their neon signs bent into images of fish. He didn’t understand why they chose to use fish, but that probably meant food, and anyone who lived as a nomad in this place knew that stations were their lifelines. Food, water and basic amenities were all available. Only one rule was strictly enforced – they couldn't take anything out of the station, nor could they set up camp there.

There were violators, and they never came out of the stations after that. The rest of them refrained from trying again after that – individually they had no chance for any kind of insurgency because they were too lacking in the skills and resources required to do so – anyway, if they didn't do anything to the shelters: try to break their rules, whatever, they would remain as temporary safe havens for them, providing free flow of food and water to recharge.

The status quo was one they were all comfortable with, and years passed without change to the current state of things.

 

He could see the illuminated fish symbol of one now – bright pink, glowing, a stark contrast to the hazy grey of their surroundings. Smoke filled the air nowadays, thanks to the constant supply of meteorite strikes they had been having. This place wasn't the most ideal of spots to settle down in, that was one thing he was sure of. He kept his stays short, his walks long, and his friendships scarce. No permanency meant no long-term acquaintances, no one he could bring himself to trust. He learnt by trial and error to live off the things he found on the streets, ransacking from bombed houses.

These items were really just transferred from one hand to another. People would build houses, store things inside them - things which they themselves had stolen from someone else - and the cycle would repeat itself every time there was a strike.

A rumour passed around, one that claimed the authorities in charge of the shelters were the ones randomly dropping items needed for survival around the place. Gus didn't know the extent of this place, except that he knew it was very big, and populated with quite a sizeable number of people.

He wasn't complaining. If they were being unusually kind with their handouts he would benefit in the long run. He had no sense of time, though. They just slept when they felt tired, usually out in the open, or under some large broken building. He had heard of entire communities established in these, although he couldn’t comment on their sustainability. When they felt refreshed and ready, they would go out to start robbing again.

Needless to say, fights broke out very often. These were one of the few things that the authorities didn't intervene in.

Shelters were supposed to be peaceful, neutral entities. People could not attack shelters. Shelters could only take care of people, unless they violated the rules of use. Gus had been to plenty of shelters in his life, met the caretakers of that place, and they were all pretty decent people as long as you stayed on their good side. They were happier if you asked for more food or water. He also tended to keep himself out of such fights. He was more of a silent shadow moving through lives – he would take what he needed and leave as inconspicuously as possible.

Nobody starved to death here. In fact, almost nobody died. The only deaths that occurred here were due to fights that occurred in the streets, or the disappearances of the imbeciles who violated the rules of the shelters. Some people didn't understand the point of their life and purposely hid themselves away in the ruins of some dark house to starve to death.

Gus didn't understand those people. His expression was one of apathy, world-weary, an unflinching figure wearing a battered green outdoor jacket that served as his blanket and bed on some days. He would grit his teeth and carry on, because he couldn't stand to be left behind. 

 

He slipped in through the open gates of the shelter, the dead grass and gravel crunching under his dirty leather shoes as he looks up at the sky. No rain for today. Rain, if scheduled, always fell after a short period of acid green storm clouds.

They never saw the atmosphere, if such a thing ever existed to them. Clouds perpetually blocked their view of the world beyond. Some didn't even believe that the sky existed at all.

Gus pushed the glass doors of the entrance open, the neon blue interior lighting taking some getting used to after his walk through the gloomy outdoors. He made his way around the multitude of circular metal tables, all crowded with strangers in thick coats crouched uncomfortably around them, each silently tucking into food sloshed on plastic plates and drinks poured into flimsy waxed cups.

"I'll have Set N, please."

The man at the counter gave him a set of utensils wrapped in a napkin and directs him to table forty-two. He took it and went back to find the table, half-hoping that it would be emptier than the ones he saw on his way to the counter.

Table forty-two was occupied by six other people. He braced himself as he squeezed his way in-between two large people in ripped parkas messily shovelling food into their mouths. The people at the table were wholly focused on eating. He saw a few of them dining on Set F, the one he tried and promptly left on the grass outside the shelter some time later. He grimaced at the sickly green liquid swirling around inside their cups and looked up at the drones orbiting the air above their heads, waiting and trying to guess which ones of them were carrying his meal.

The food arrived soon enough, hot enough for steam to rise and neatly arranged on a red plastic tray. He took the paper plate and cup off the drone and set it down on the small sliver of space he had on the table, unwrapping the napkin from the bundled utensils. The man on his right stopped chewing for a few moments to run his eyes over Gus's meal, then abruptly opened his mouth to speak.

"That any good?"

Gus folded the napkin over his shirt neckline like a bib, a habit he adopted to avoid getting food onto his clothes while dining in such a cramped place. He looked at the man.

"Yeah, it's - it's alright."

"Think I'll go for seconds." The man wiped his lips with his napkin and stood up, making his way to the counter. Gus watched him go with a bored expression on his face and tucked into his meal, mind unfocused, drifting lazily over considerations about where he would sleep later. A drone came over shortly to clear the used plates and cups.

Gus left the shelter after downing three cups of scalding tea. He shrugged his jacket on and took his bag, feeling a little exhausted from the bright lights inside the eating place. Along the way out he noticed a number of the compound guards sitting on the grass, having their meals. It had never occurred to him to wonder where all their staff slept when they were tired. Exclusive units, perhaps. He didn’t feel comfortable thinking about that. It threatened his beliefs, and he was not fond of changing them.

 

He set about finding a good place to sleep, for the time being. A shady spot under a wilted tree overladen with dead vines seemed alright. His previous house only consisted of four walls and a few wooden beams for a roof. 

He used his rucksack as a pillow and lay down, eyes turned up to the cloudy sky. Concrete was foreign; uncomfortable. He liked the grass better.

His head hit something hard in his rucksack and he grunted, rubbing the back of his scalp as he pulled the zipper up with his other hand. It had to be the canned cherries. He would eat those now, and discard the can later, or maybe crush it and use it for something else, he didn’t know.

He took the can out and cracked the lid open easily, using his hands to pick the slimy fruit out of its metal confines.

As he chewed, he noticed the olive-green book lying in a corner of the bag, and curiously took it out to examine it closely. Ank ink sketch of a girl with her hair on fire was stuck to the front page. The face was a black hole of a scream. No eyes or nose, just a mouth.

He didn’t normally read – in fact, he’d been illiterate until he started learning to spell out requests on paper and seeing through misleading directional signs. He opened it, and it was filled with messy scrawls. He held it up to the light coming from the shelter neon sign a number of metres away, and confirmed that it was a diary of some sort, or a recording book.

Of what, he didn’t know. The language wasn't something that he understood.

He didn’t hear of anyone who even wrote in diaries now. That was something their distant ancestors used to do, but nobody had the habit of keeping their pathetic musings and feelings down in little books, at least, not over here. He personally preferred squashing them out on the dirt when he got angry.

Gus flicked through a few more pages, finding more sides of writing, and closed it dismissively. He left only the soft items in his rucksack, keeping the book at the bottom of it all. The grass was short and didn’t poke through the fabric of his clothes. He found a comfortable position to be in and settled down.

Sleep always came easily to him: he didn't know what dreams were. Uneventful rest was what he had and all he wanted. He closed his misty eye and looked up at the oily green foliage above him with the seeing pupil, the grey smoke in the air settling upon him like silk, pulling him down into an emotionless, guided slumber.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gritty vibe [accompaniment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OphIlJ6yrW8)


	8. this is 现实 (b)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> \- "you guys are the only ones crazy enough to come in here. enjoy the show."  
> \- describe the broken light of all these stars

 

Matt found an old box of clockwork toys crusted with moth-eaten felt which stuck to the insides of the wood. There was a stuffed dog inside that was missing its head.

He took it out and set it on the floor. 

Ying had been working the whole afternoon, picking the place apart with a pair of blunt scissors and a rag. Matt opened boxes of costumes and dancing shoes, empty cases of stage makeup and drawers of smudged scripts.

They had nothing else to do.

“I’d wanted to make something out of these clothes,” Ying said, holding up a faded red military jacket, “but some of them look really good.”

Matt started winding the key on the back of the dog.

“Looks like the nutcracker,” he said.

“Yeah.” Ying paused. “Like a toy soldier.”

“We had one of those painted Russian dolls in the cabinet, but it was broken. Some children were playing with it, probably. The littlest guy in the middle was missing.”

Ying looked up. “Ah, so you’ve seen it too.”

“I thought it looked like a vase, you know. Those things are so pear-shaped.” He held his hand out, curling his fingers upwards. “Like, the bottom half of it.”

They watched the clockwork dog make its way around the leg of a low table before collapsing into a dust bunny.

She wrinkled her nose. “Cute.”

“Seph-hyung told me they had a family performing here.” Matt chucked the toy dog back into the box and snapped the lid shut. “Thought it was a circus, though."

“I told him. We suspected they were one of those ... travelling artists.”

“Ah.” Matt nodded. “Wouldn’t know. Skeletons were gone by the time we came.”

He looked like he was going to laugh, suddenly remembering something.

“Oh. There was only that guy though, up in the projection room.”

Ying pressed a pile of folded costumes into a clean box, and the dust rose from them in a cloud when she pushed the layers of tulle and frills in. Matt leaned over and waved his hand back and forth to clear the air.

“I’m pretty sure the vultures came in before we did.” She looked up at him, coughing. “That ceiling crater’s been here a long time.”

He leaned back, rubbing his palms against each other.

“Still never fails to amaze me how much dust can build up here after a couple of years.”

“That stuff is omnipresent,” she said, coughing again. “They’re like cockroaches. Dust will be still be here after everyone’s gone.”

“And the poor fellow up there was decomposing into it with his money and newspapers.”

“This whole set-up is just … weird. Like, the projectionist collected ticket fees too. Back when the stage was open, they had a staircase which led up from the main entrance.” She traced the layout in the air. “The person at the front-of-house wasn’t handling payment at all. They were ushers.”

“That’s a strange way of doing things.”

“I know.”

“Hyung was sure they were the only people left.” Matt stood up, walked over to the dresser where Miwu had filled two teacups with hot water that was going cold. “The crew, I mean.”

“ _If_ they did work here at that time.” Ying folded down the lid of the box. “And if you want to rely on those drowsy matinee records, I’d say it was business as usual on that day.”

Matt drained the cup, looked at it for a moment and set it back down carefully on the saucer.

“God, what kind of place was this?”

“I still don’t really know.” Ying frowned and uncapped a marker. “If you ask around people will say different things.”

“Like what?”

She was writing on the box, the tip squeaking on dusty cardboard. She winced at the sound.

“Some of them didn’t even know that it was operational.”

Matt kept quiet, waiting for her to finish.

“Well –” he finally said, seeing her unravel the plastic string from a bundle. “Did you tell them?”

“No. But here’s the thing about what some of the older folks said. There were lights at night. And there was music. Some of them went in and watched plays and recitals. They all told me the same thing and said their parents told them it was a family here.” She sniffed, looping the string over the box. “Young kids with scabs on their knees and red hair. They trained hard. There was a lovely lady who looked like Marilyn Monroe with the blonde wig and the flying skirt. Great voices on everyone. All that.”

Matt frowned. “Half of them probably died in the flood.”

“You know,” she said, smiling a little. “When you put it like that - it’s true. They’re all dead now.”

“No, I didn’t mean it like –”

“Yeah, okay. But it’s true. I only asked the neighbouring town.”

“Whatever’s left of it.”

“Yeah.”

“So they didn’t mind? Talking to you?”

She nodded. “Some of them. They kinda knew who we were, though. Said, _aren’t you one of those kids from the theatre?_ I told them yes.”

She paused for a beat, scrutinising the soles of the shoes in the basket.

“Like, I don’t normally talk to anyone except maybe Hwang-unnie at Roque. And the electricity dude, once in a while.”

“That wasn’t supposed to happen.” Matt sucked his breath in, let it out slowly. “What the hell.”

Ying started wiping down a pair of black Oxfords with the cloth.

“They’ve seen us," she said. "But a lot of them tell me to keep the place. They don’t really seem to like it.”

Matt walked back towards her, sat down on the floor.

“So how many times a week do you go down to Roque?”

She knocked the toe of the shoe on the floor. “Used to be every alternate day but now - it’s just a weekly visit. The food’s getting better these days, anyway. Her brother’s hand got better so he’s kinda … helping out in the kitchen now.”

“Ah - she’s still giving us stuff in lunchboxes.”

“She’ll get a proper set.” Ying shook her head. “Someday. Maybe when they open up the canal to the other side. There’s a bigger settlement there, I heard.”

Matt noticed a smudge on the mirror, and rubbed at it with the pad of his thumb.

“Then, what about Aarfy?”

“Oh, you still remember him?” She had this amused look on her face. “He’s fine. Last time I asked at his old place he got a car. Broken piece of crap, but it works.” She rubbed at her nose with the back of her hand. “Drew some salary for a while, from working at the barber. Still smoking that god awful-smelling stuff. I think his lungs must be half-gone by now.”

“When you brought him back that time the skin was burnt off his arm. All the way to the elbow, the poor kid.”

“We didn’t even know those firecrackers were there.” She huffed. “Anyway.”

Matt shook his head. “Gotta thank those guys.”

“I do. I tell to come here but they still avoid this place like it’s diseased or something. People tend to stay at a distance –”

“– Is it because of our clothes?”

“Stop.” Ying glared at him. “I already talked about this. Stop.”

She pushed the box to the side with a grunt, then grabbed the tin of half-used leather polish and the rag. Matt was crouching opposite, scratching his dirty fingernails into the grooves of the floor. The surface was calcified, old as dirt.

“They don’t like it?”

“I can’t say for sure.” She put the shoe aside, picked up the other one and turned it over in her hand. “Seems like people are looking for gossip again.”

Matt laughed. “You think they’ll like the rural life if it still involves hanging around like this after, what, ten, twenty years?”

Ying dabbed the clean part of the cloth into the tin, the polish coming out all dark and powdery. She peered dubiously it for a few moments.

“Look at it this way,” she finally said, rubbing the cloth over the shoe. “I know it makes them sick. They don’t want to see what it was like before because they’re still trying to forget all their shit.”

He frowned. “Forget _what_?”

“That they used to enjoy themselves.”

 

He went out to find Miwu for a while, and she was mopping the floor in the washroom. It was the only one they used. There was a ventilator fan at the side that wasn’t working, and the tiles were all bleached ashen grey, like the water had run the colours out of them. 

She slopped the soapy water around on the tiles, toiling with the broken mop bucket and knotting her hair up at the back with a crazy-looking bird hairpin.

“We really need to fix the backstage lights,” he said. “I’ve hated the colour ever since Seph installed it. I’m going to lose it soon if she makes me spend one more day inside there.”

Miwu just smiled, didn't say anything.

He paused in front of the sink and washed his hands. 

“Hey, this stuff smells good.”

“The detergent?" She looked up. "That’s from the supermarket.”

He brought his hands closer to his face, inhaling deeply. “Reminds me of the old practice room.”

“Oh,” Miwu laughed, dumped the mop into the bucket and squeezed it out. “Yeah.”

 

There had been a loud crash outside, sometime in the middle of the clean-up. They went outside to check the stage area, leaning over the railings and looking down. 

There was no one. Miwu pulled back, started back towards the washroom.

“I thought something happened,” he said darkly.

“You heard it too, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. Must be the place settling, or something.” He pushed the washroom door open. “It’s like –”

“– Like the halls are alive.”

Miwu laughed at his bemused expression.

“Come on," she said. "Pray that nothing happens to us too.”

 

They left the lights on and the orange colour was starting to get to him, blinding in their chromatic, insidious way. Matt was ripping holes in a thin piece of material - some veil or mosquito net - he didn’t know. The sound was pretty nice to listen to.

Ying’s red hair wasn’t making the lighting any better. 

Seph clattered into the backstage area. Matt saw his silhouette, tall and hunched, projected onto the wall at the other side from the glaring spotlights.

He stopped in front of Matt, leaned down and pulled at the mess of wrappers and tissue paper piled in front of him.

Matt looked up and they stared at each other, confused.

“Must be nice to waste time.” Seph grinned. “The hell are you doing?”

“It’s like bubble wrap,” Matt explained, looking down. “But maybe better.”

He pulled at the individual webs, listening to the snapping sounds in dry silence as they broke apart and tangled between his fingers.

Seph observed him for a while, then lost interest and stepped gingerly over boxes to get to the dresser, where the empty tea set was.

“Drinks,” he murmured, sounding pleased. “Any left for me?”

“You’re finally back,” Ying said, coming out of the dressing room. They had stacked the old boxes inside, all the labels and raffia string holding the flimsy cartons together.

She went to the dresser and dropped the keys into an empty wineglass. Seph stepped aside, turning to face her.

“So –” she fixed him with an expectant gaze. “What are _you_ doing?”

He looked at Matt.

“Yeah," he breathed in loudly. "Any of you seen Miwu-ssi?”

“She’s upstairs,” Matt said, crumpling the net between his fingers. “Cleaning toilets. Go help her if you’re bored.”

“I was busy.”

“So are we.” Ying checked her hair in the mirror, brushing at loose strands with her pinkie. “What were you doing?”

“I needed her to help me, actually.”

Matt looked up.

“Yeah? With what?”

“Okay.” Seph sighed. “There’s like … a car outside.”

Ying was tying her hair. She turned around.

“Come again?”

“I think there are people outside.”

Matt fell back against the wall, stared at all the orange light on their white clothes. He noticed that one of Seph’s shoelaces had come undone. The shoelace was grey with dirt, frayed at the end.

Ying took her jacket out of the drawer.

“From where?”

Seph hesitated. “I don’t know.”

“Did you even see them?”

“No. But it wasn’t there before. There’s … there's no one else who's supposed to come around here at this time.”

“Hyung,” Matt said, “your laces.”

Seph looked down and shifted his feet distractedly, but didn’t do anything.

“And you wanted Miwu’s help with that?”

“I mean, she’s a nice girl.”

Ying sniffed, pushing herself up to sit on the dresser. “That won’t work all the time.”

“You locked the back doors, right?”

She pulled her jacket on. “Never unlocked them in the first place.”

“The broken shutter.”

“That’s barred up with heavy furniture.”

Seph paused, thinking. “I was in the booth all the time. I could see if anyone came up the stairs. But there was nobody.”

“They must be outside, then.”

Matt started to rise, groaning at the pain in his back. He walked over, languid and aching, to where they were, hitting on the strained muscle with a fist.

“Should I tell Miwu?”

They both looked at Ying. She abruptly got off the table and strode towards the curtains.

“Wait,” Seph said, “what are you doing?”

“I’m going out.” She flipped the hem of her jacket. “What else do you think this is for?”

 

Miwu was coming down the staircase when they all clattered out of the wings, propping the cleaning things against the wall. 

“You’re here,” Seph stopped suddenly. “You know, I was asking them about you, and –”

Miwu pointed. “What’s she doing?”

Matt was still walking slowly ahead, moving in-between the aisles. The theatre was dark.

Seph squinted at Ying’s retreating back.

“Maybe we’re not the only ones searching.” He exhaled loudly, then said, louder, “did you see the car?”

“No.”

They made their way to the front-of-house.

 

Ying was already fiddling with the chain lock at the entrance. It was a small barred room with a gate built into the rails, and the looming spiral staircase above their heads. Inside, the shadows fell onto their faces in straight lines, dim from the spotlights across the auditorium.

She didn’t look at them. 

“Uh –” Seph paused. “We’re having the screening tonight, right?”

Ying pulled the chain off, letting it clatter to the floor.

“Of course.”

Miwu frowned, confused.

“What’s he saying about a … car?”

“A car,” Matt echoed distantly, and all turned to look at him. “Isn’t it still outside?”

He was coming up behind them, bending over forwards and hissing with pain. Miwu stepped back and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Muscle cramp?” she whispered, and he nodded.

Seph looked worried.

“Yeah,” Ying said, glancing briefly at him before unlocking the door. “We’ve got, like, visitors. What even.”

 

They were standing outside.

The pickup was a pale shapeless thing in the dark distance, blurred by the settling dust.

They looked around. Seph whistled through his teeth.

“I never realised you could see the road from here,” Miwu said. Her voice was low, quiet in the breeze.

Matt leaned against the doorframe.

“It wasn’t that obvious.”

“Maybe they’re at the back. If they know we’ve got entrances all around they might try to come in on the other side.”

Ying hovered near the entrance for a while, then stated down to the border of the theatre.

“I should stay here,” Matt said. “Don't mind me. Just in case they come back. I’m sure she can handle it.”

 

Ying came back later. There were two people walking behind her.

Seph craned his neck to check the door. 

“Hell, she really caught them,” he said, rubbing cigarette ash onto the armrest of his seat. "What a sight."

Miwu stood up and moved out into the aisle, cautious footsteps soft on worn-out carpeting.

Ying raised her eyebrows at them before turning around to close the door. The people who walked in were silent, thickly cast in shadows. A young guy and a younger girl.

The girl pushed her messy hair back from her face. “Didn’t know this place was operational.”

Ying stood at the door, not moving.

“We’re the owners.”

The girl shifted her unsteady gaze to Miwu, who blinked nervously, then back at Ying.

“Are we disturbing you, then?”

“No,” Seph said, and turned around slowly, resting his elbow on the backrest of his seat to see them better. “We wouldn’t mind if you joined us.”

“For what?”

“A screening. We have movie nights.”

He pointed at the stage, where the huge white sheet was slung over the metal bars at the top. It was slightly ripped at the bottom, unwavering in the still air.

The guy started to pull on her arm, but she didn’t move.

“What kind of shows?”

Ying smiled – although Seph thought it didn’t look very genuine, from what he could make out in the dim light. She made a big show of searching her jacket pockets.

The guy looked uncomfortable.

“You know what, I think we’ll just –”

“What’s your name?” Seph pointed at him with his lighted cigarette, smoke rising into the air. 

The guy stopped moving, stood where he was. He looked doubtful. 

“Nam.”

“And the kid?”

She looked at Seph. “Cho.”

“Great. We’re the Deck. We used to perform, last time. I don’t know if you’ve heard of us.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Sometimes we have people coming in, but they come in because they really want to see something, you know?”

“We’re here for the lunar eclipse.”

Seph exchanged glances with Ying, then looked back at them.

“Never heard of it.”

“Because there’s a hole in the roof, and this place is old?”

Matt was still lying down, flat on his back, across four seats.

“That’s what everyone says,” he drawled, then stretched and yawned.

“Yeah,” Ying said. “You guys join us tonight. Go choose your seats, or whatever. We’re not expecting anyone else, anyway.”

She turned and walked towards the stage. Matt closed his eyes and Seph continued to stare at them while they shuffled to the front, looking out over the expanse of the auditorium, at the torn upholstery of the seats and the fading fabric, the water-stained carpeting over the steps.

“Miwu cleaned the place out,” he said loudly, voice hollow. “Don’t worry. No bedbugs.”

They stopped in the centre of the aisle, pointed towards a couple of seats somewhere in the middle section and tentatively made their way in, leaving an empty seat in-between.

Seph leaned back in his seat, watching the white light of the stage, the blankness of the screen, the absence of any activity elsewhere. They’d have to wait until the sky was completely dark to start the screening.

Matt was sleeping on the seats at the far end of his row. Seph stared at him for a while, shifted in his seat, and turned his attention back to the stage.

Nam and Cho were talking to each other in front, whispering in low, hushed tones. That was the only sound he heard.

 

At around nine, Seph got up and made his way up to the projectionist booth. Ying stopped him on the spiral stairs. 

“Play that film,” she whispered. “The blue one. I’ll go tell the rest beforehand.”

He grinned, a taut smile that didn’t show any teeth. Ying elbowed him roughly as she went down in the other direction, the iron stairs creaking with the weight of their steps.

 

He was sitting upstairs, setting up the projector. The reel was lying on top of it, with the casing and the label.

Below, Ying was talking to Nam and Cho.

 

“You guys okay?” she called, walking down the aisle. She was holding food – some kind of sandwich that was meatless and cold, just out of the refrigerator.

Nam held his and stared at it, turning it over in its plastic wrapping.

“Yeah,” Cho said, taking hers. “Thanks.”

“We’re starting soon.”

“Okay.”

She stood there, watching them tear the wrappers open.

“How long have you been here?” Cho asked, suddenly looking up through a mouthful of food.

There was silence for a while.

“Uh –” Ying took a long, deep breath. “If you ask everyone, they’ll give a different answer. I can’t really say.”

“You were performers?” Nam ventured, chewing carefully.

“Used to be.”

“Nobody comes in here?”

“Sometimes, but it’s not a weekly thing. Like I said,” she explained, “if they do, they come inside looking for one thing, and it’s never us.”

“Anyone ever told you about the ceiling?”

“We knew about it.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

She shrugged. “Helps us keep track of the time.”

“Why don’t you guys go out to the towns?”

“The towns?” she repeated, like she hadn't heard them right the first time. “Like, they’re not really our thing?”

Cho nodded slowly.

“We get stuff from there, though. The food.” She gestured at their sandwiches.

“Oh.”

“Whatever it _is_ –” she said, suddenly energetic again, “you guys are the only ones crazy enough to come in here today.” She stepped back, looking up, and raised her hand at Seph.

The lights onstage went out completely, plunging the auditorium into darkness. She walked away.

“Enjoy the show.”

 

Matt clattered up the stairs and burst into the projectionist room somewhere in the middle of the screening. He found Seph crouched over a stack of old newspapers, flipping the brittle pages back and forth.

Seph didn’t look up. “How are they taking it?" 

“Don’t seem to be saying anything.” Matt laughed. “They’re like, stone-still. I woke up about ten minutes in because of the static ambient sound and I saw them there a few rows in front.”

“And you figured out what the hell was going on.” 

“It was Ying-ssi, right?”

Seph nodded. “Yeah.”

“I didn’t do anything after that. Watched for a while, until I couldn’t take it anymore. Then I came up.”

Seph turned the page, grinning. “You go back down later and check on them.”

“Yeah,” Matt nodded. “Sure.”

 

Nam and Cho left after that, no commotion or anything. They all went downstairs to send them off. Ying gave them four packs of those cold sandwiches. 

“Listen,” Miwu said gently, “how did you find out about us?”

Cho blinked. “The Internet. Some people posted reviews about this place. It’s still on the map.”

“As what?”

“Byeol Theatre.”

Ying repeated the word a few times, testing it on her tongue. She liked the sound.

Matt raised his hand. “Did they say anything about us?”

Cho shook her head

“It’s abandoned,” she said, stepping out, “as far as anyone outside knows.”

Before they closed the door, Nam suddenly pressed his hand to the door handle. Ying stopped, surprised.

“Sorry, what’s the name of the film?”

Ying hesitated for a few moments, caught off-guard. Behind her, Seph snapped his fingers.

“Things we Gain in the Flood, or the fish film." He paused, then added, "Fallen Angels.”

Nam squinted, looking confused, but he nodded and allowed Ying to close the door.

A moment later, his muffled voice came through the door, followed by two knocks.

“Thanks.”

 

They watched the pickup take off down the road from the projectionist room window.

Matt rested his elbows on the pane. “You think we’ll ever see them again?” 

“I doubt it.” Ying looked up at the sky. “They look like … those kinds of people who go places.”

Miwu chuckled softly. “They wanted to see the eclipse, right?”

“Guess they got what they asked for.”

She paused, and they all stared up at the sky.

“My goodness,” Miwu murmured. “It _really_ is an eclipse. At early morning, too.”

“Looks nice.”

Nobody said anything for a while.

“You think we’ve missed out on a lot being in here?” Seph said, looking down at the ground outside. “We didn’t even know about such things.”

“That kind of thing’s only available in newspapers and the Internet. And you –” Ying turned to glance at him, “– you only read those papers from before the flood. Doesn’t make any sense to go forward now, anyway.”

They laughed, and went quiet again.

“So,” Matt said, tapping on the window pane. “Byeol Theatre, huh?”

Ying grinned. “Yeah.”

“There was a family. A big one, with grandchildren. And a ticketing man. Stagehands and assistants and ushers.” Matt paused, incredulous. “And nobody remembers them now.” 

Ying shook her head. “Whatever. They can still remember us.”

“I don’t think any of them do.” Seph laughed and rubbed his chin. “Like, didn’t you hear what the Cho kid said?”

"Was her name Cho?" Miwu looked at him, surprised.

"Yeah. The guy was Nam. I asked them."

“It doesn’t really matter. I’m sure _they’ll_ remember us. That’s enough for me.”

“Why?”

Ying took the film reel into her hands. “I’m beginning to think this thing isn’t so useless after all. It’s probably got some meaning to it.”

"See." Seph pointed at her. “I _told_ you.”

Matt took it from her. “Give it a chance. You’re gonna watch it again?”

“Maybe.” She paused, still looking at it. “Maybe.”

A wind blew into the room, cold and dusty as ever. The moon was turning a deep red in the sky, the colour of hell. All the ground below was purple and serene, fringed with black spurred trees that stretched out beyond their line of sight from up here. Most of them were dead.

Miwu broke the silence.

“You really think they’ll remember us?” 

Seph shrugged. “Believe whatever you want to believe.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> don't be [afraid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgiGM9mbAPw)


	9. messenger fin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> as it says, fin.
> 
> also whew its been a wild ride trying to finish this piece but it's the first one that i'm finally actually proud of, so it's near and dear to my heart. thank you for showing love to it thus far.

 

The first part of the ride back was quiet. They had enough fuel to cover them all the way back across the coastline and to the swamp settlement again. Cho was driving them back for the first four hours, then Nam would take over for the rest of the journey. The car was dark.

“That film was … something,” he said.

“I didn’t expect anything like that. The whole thing was so strange.” She shivered. “They weren’t even surprised to see us.”

“Maybe they’re used to people bursting in unannounced.”

“With a place like that?”

“I thought it wasn’t too bad. You said it had vintage things inside but I guess we didn’t really get a tour.”

“I don’t think I’d want to.”

“I’ll probably check it out online, tomorrow.”

“The film?"

“Yeah. Fallen Angels. Or the Fish film.” He laughed. “What a name.”

“I thought she was talking about flooding. Or maybe it was just me. I got that message.”

“Oh man,” Nam shook his head. “Yeah. I did too. I think that’s what she was trying to say.”

“About the fish being in the water?”

“No, like – she’s the fish, and the world around her, the blue room and everything – that’s the water. She’s living in this blue-coloured thing that’s choking her, and it’s like the fish tank.”

“So she’s saying that she’s a fish.”

“I think so. And like, the symbolism can be related to each other. Look at the title.”

“A fish, like a fallen angel?”

“Exactly.”

“But that doesn’t mean anything.”

“She’s saying that she’s the fish and the fallen angel. She’s swimming around inside the blue and trapped in that glass, like the room. She’s trapped because she’s fallen.”

“Oh –” Cho paused, thinking. “Oh man. I think I get it.”

“She used the fish tank as a smaller representation of the room she was stuck in.”

“Did you remember what she said, though?”

“Not really. Only the last part, maybe.”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “That was quite scary.”

“It sounded scary, but I think it’s supposed to be more optimistic than it appears to be.”

“How so?”

“Okay,” Nam paused. “Okay, so you see that she’s like, this really sad person trapped in water, drowning, and she says she’s the fallen angel, right?”

Cho nodded.

“Then she becomes the fish, because she put that new object into the fish tank. Or maybe the fish was there all along, and she didn’t realise it. And when she _becomes_ the fighter fish she gets red colours in her life. It’s a change of scenery, like a new emotion. The cherry cans came after that part. You notice how she put on that red and blue silk jacket?”

“I was going to say something about red being a symbol for many feelings, but,” Cho waved her hand. “Go on.”

“No, you’re right. That’s where the ambiguity comes in. Because she’s this Siamese fighting fish with blue and red inside her, and even though she’s going around inside the glass, she’s still trapped. But she learns how to deal with it."

“With the existing sadness.”

“With the existing sadness.” He nodded. “You see, when she saw herself in the fish, she saw their similar situations. That’s where the rain comes in. When it rains – and this part is true – when it rains you can’t really tell, not if you’re underwater.”

“Oh.”

“So I suspected it was some kind of depiction of the flood as well. Maybe if you can see the connection between flood and rain and recovering. People are all drowning out here in their own metaphorical floods after the big one, but - well - because we’re so sad, I guess, more won’t hurt.”

“Wow.” Cho stared straight ahead, but she was listening intently. “Wow. That’s … that’s really deep.”

Nam pursed his lips and nodded.

He replied a moment later, just for the sake of breaking the eerie silence that followed.

“Yeah.”

 

They drove right into dawn, the red of the lunar eclipse fading behind them as the clouds were tinged by sunrise. Gold and orange blending with each other. The road was lined on both sides, and the trees eventually gave way to cluttered, open stretches of beach.

Cho suggested that they stop for breakfast. They parked the car on the sand and she took the packs of sandwiches out, slightly cold and soggy and squashed, and passed two of them to Nam. Then, walking carefully on speckled sand and dirt, they tracked across the beach to the cleaner section of it, where there were rocks and debris stacked against the breakwater. The sea was already turning from black to grey, slashed with orange as the night gave way to morning. No ships on the horizon - not anymore - just a clear line where they could see the sea begin under the sky.

And looking at it, Nam was thinking about the fear it still instilled in people. Maybe what it did to him. He still couldn’t bring himself to go near the water.

They stayed a distance from the coast, sitting down on the dry sand and being careful not to get any of it into their shoes. When they stopped moving, he realised how quiet it was.

 

“Did your friend live with you?” Cho suddenly asked, finding a comfortable position to sit in.

Nam was peeling back the plastic wrapper carefully. He froze. She waited patiently, fiddling with hers.

“We were friends in school,” he started, looking around. “For some time.”

“Oh,” she replied, chewing. “That’s nice.”

He took a bite of his sandwich. The taste was weird, but kind of good.

“I mean, maybe there’s no point trying to keep it away anymore,” he said, so quickly that she stopped eating and stared at him. “I mean, I’ll just tell you what happened. It’s already happened.”

“He didn’t leave on purpose, did he?”

Nam didn't say anything for a long time.

“No.”

“He gave you that picture?" 

“Yeah. The pickup was his too. We used to sleep in the back.”

She nodded tactfully, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

“And we used to sleep on those old tennis courts as well.”

She laughed. “Why?”

“No reason why. It was fun.”

“Ah,” she nodded at him. "I understand."

They finished their sandwiches, crumpling the wrapping into a messy wad. Nam decided to save his second one for later, so he sat still and waited for Cho to finish hers.

“We’ve still got food back there, right?”

“Some. We finished most of it, though.”

He shook his head, smiling. “More like you did.”

“Yeah, okay." She took a bite, chewed, and swallowed. "But you drank a lot of soda.”

“I get dehydrated easily.”

She took another bite, chewing again, and they stayed that way for a while. Quiet.

“You have to remember, you know?” she said, after swallowing her last bite. “Everyone always says that when you remember them they never really go away. It’s true.”

“I know that. But it’ll end with me. I don’t think there’s anyone else he knew who's still alive and kicking.”

“That’s okay.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Nam poked a finger into the sand next to his feet. “That way, when I go, we’ll both go together again. Kinda. Like, symbolically.”

“Yeah,” she nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah. Definitely.”

“And what about you?”

She thought for a long time.

“You know how you said that you didn’t want to come along? The first time I brought up the idea?”

“Huh.” He laughed sheepishly. “Yeah.”

“I hope you don’t regret it.”

“No, no.” He held his hands up in defense. “I mean, it was good. I don’t normally seek out places actively, you see. Just ... this chance was really good.”

She nodded, grinning.

Nam had been poking his finger around in the sand for a while, and then she pushed it into something cold and hard. He dug around with his thumb and found the ridged back of a seashell. Intrigued, he lifted it up and turned it over. A little hermit crab crawled out of the sandy mound he’d dug out. He crossed his legs, immediately placing a hand flat on the ground and using the other one to pick the crab up. It was small, light, and tickled his palm slightly.

He held it up between two fingers.

“Look,” he said, turning around and showing it to Cho.

“Aw,” she laughed. “Aw, look at that. Where’d you find it?”

He pointed at the patch of sand next to his feet.

“How’d it get in there?”

“No idea.” He grinned, watching it move. “I haven’t seen them in a while.”

Cho leaned closer to peer at it, then shifted back to a crouching position.

“You like animals?”

“Sure.” He nodded, lowering it. “Yeah, I do.”

“Did your friend like them?"

He laughed, shaking his head, still smiling.

“Well – why do you like them?”

He didn’t look at her, still holding the crab. He put it back into the shell and watched it move around inside the mound of sand, laughing quietly to himself.

“I don’t know,” he eventually said, but he was too distracted.

 

It was already mid-morning. 

The waves rolled and tumbled, thick with white foam. The beach was still deserted, just the wind and the occasional bird soaring overhead. Twigs littered the area where the high tide had reached the previous night. 

“I’m glad I went out there.” Nam looked over at her, trying to emphasise the intent of what he wanted to say. “Really puts things into perspective.”

Cho nodded.

“Spontaneity’s all part of the fun, ‘cos now there’s nothing watching you.” She leaned back, digging her palms into the sand. “And if you decide that one day you don’t want it anymore, well - you'll still be able to find your way back home.”

Nam let the tiny crab scoot off the edge of his index finger, watched it scramble away on fast little legs, a fond smile broad on his face.

“It’s good to know that,” he replied vaguely, eyes still fixed on the elongated shadow of the retreating animal, squinting against the sun. “It’s important. To know that there’s always a choice.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> starring jung jinsol, lee sunmi, choi yerim, kim namjoon (and his crab-hunting), K.A.R.D ensemble, son hyejoo, and a kim seokjin mention. 
> 
> tunes: [#1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN1wJD2WHHA) [#2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O446XppZzXA) [#3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftOy8kz7aE) [#4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YAjN_b0hXY)
> 
> thanks for reading. 💖


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